Erin refecting on our friendship (I)

Erin and I both decided that we'll go for a slightly more uplifting theme and since her direct perspective on our friendship has never been posted, here it is.

How the heck....

The background to how we met has been gone through many times. What matters to me is Curiosity stuck his neck out and helped me reach a decision to not run from a job that I put my heart and soul in and literally bled to get. And loyalty is the no.1 value for me when it comes to friendship.

The second most important value is honesty. Obviously just about everybody will not accept major deceit in friendships but I intensely HATE the sort of BSing/convenient truths that NZ men especially seem to regard as perfectly acceptable in so many contexts of socialising. The number of men who claimed to work in my real field of work and being a member of the profession that I am now in when I was hooking was staggering. C told me a few things about his life when he booked me years back and they matched up 100% with reality. Same goes for what he has told me since we met at our real workplace.

What this has meant is that we have been able to genuinely relate to each other and without being constantly on guard. And it has given us the confidence and safety net to practically develop our friendship.

Opening myself for a potential can of hurt?

I have a young child and she is the centre of everything in my life. Her plus full-time work leaves limited time for socialising and I have even less desire to waste time on things like Facebook chat, texting, and other permutations of shallow, meaningless friendships. My motto is that either we really be friends in the traditional sense of the word or just be acquaintances. Since "outing" the Erin pseudonym to a few trusted ex/current WL friends, the common question from them is how I could trust "outing" so much of my life, including my child, to an ex-client.

It's not like I just delivered my child to him to look after out of the blue one day. After knowing each other for "real" for about 3 weeks, knowing that he obviously has a responsible job and, most importantly, almost certainly has no criminal record, I took my daughter with me to go to C's house to have drinks and banter one weekend. Did it because the invitation was impromptu, I couldn't get a babysitter, and he welcomed my child. Nobody has ever been able to convince me how the fact that he once paid to fuck me a few times makes him automatically so much more dangerous. And of course things have developed since.

The fact is many men have a tendency to approach women just to fulfil their selfish needs, be it a free lay, to just off-load their shit, or to have "mental" affairs. Yes, given what C knew about my experiences when hooking and given that he is in close physical proximity to me daily, his potential to hurt me is higher. But if he chooses to do so, he is the rotten one and I see no reason to trap myself in a virtual prison because I used to be a WL and he was a client.

How the heck do you relate to....... his partner?

Yep, I am friends with C's life partner. Our first introduction consisted of me hugging her and saying "Hi, I am [real name] and I've fucked your guy and he's a good lay". And we proceeded to laugh our heads off. Again, can't emphasise enough how the honesty between C and I (and also C's partner) has paid massive dividends. It was always told to me that C and his lady is in an open relationship and that their respective sexual habits are fully open. And it's true.

This has saved me from being concerned over some jealous, crazy woman ruining my life, or having some guy who started out wanting to be friends stalking me for sex, and goodness knows what else. Myself and C's partner has our own independent friendship (and he's excluded on all girls' shopping trips) whilst C's lady will gratefully exclude herself from our favoured activity of long walks.

In terms of handling the "sexual dynamics", our respective real life situations (I am single and largely in no mood for sex lately) has meant that we can be highly open about matters that most people consider unsuitable for so called civilised company and that were we to shag as a dyad amongst this triplet (and we haven't), it's no big deal.

Ultimately, friendships are friendships. It's just that ours is a bit more colourful and open. I recommend anyone in a potential WL/ex-client type of friendship situation to adopt the Reagan motto "Trust but verify!" - proceed slowly of course but don't define yourself or a potential friend based on how you used to shag.

Next time....

How we have really changed each other, broken through self-built walls, and handling the inevitable conflicts over life and opinions to do with the industry.