Those Three Little Words

You can't have enough friends. While I am sure that there are those who might argue this nugget of wisdom, I find myself reflecting back on my teenage years and wondering how I found myself agreeing with them.
It began sometime in junior high, along about the time that we all began our first attempts at coupling off. I felt like I had a pretty sure thing, having spent roughly six years anticipating my eventual betrothal to the girl down the street. It was a great story: childhood sweethearts. Little did I know that my childhood would continue for several more years.
I blame myself for showing up to seventh grade ill-prepared for the rigors and torments that junior high school had to offer. After all, I chose to join the band, and my lack of coordination in P.E. insured my label: geek. By the time eighth grade rolled around and I attempted to rub some of the nerd stink off myself by joining first the wrestling team and then the track team, it was already too late. Geeks were not part of the dating pool.
It was during these years that I learned to resent a certain phrase. A three word phrase that would have been fine if it had been left at just two: good friends. Good friends are hard to come by, but the part that always made me flinch was the "just" that went in front of it: Just Good Friends. It was that dash of flavoring that made the whole meal turn sour. When the girl down the street told me she wanted to be "just good friends," I began an odyssey that lasted another three years.
I was that guy who listened when boyfriends left them high and dry. I was the guy who went out and didn't "try anything." I was a nice guy. Consequently, I had a lot of good friends who were girls, and anytime that I felt like pressing the edge of that envelope, I was reminded that I was, after all, in band. I even had the temerity to ask a cheerleader to the Homecoming Dance in my junior year in high school. As crazy as it sounds, it seemed like a pretty safe bet, since she had spent the year before in the marching band's flag line. I was a gentleman all evening long, and when I walked her to her at the end of the night, I leaned in for what I hoped would be my first official goodnight kiss.
"I don't kiss on the first date," she told me.
How could I have been so foolish? I should have had a dozen or so dates ahead of this one so that the outcome would have been more certain. Of course, when I called the next week to set up a second date, I found out our relationship was better defined by those three little words.
It wasn't until my senior year that I finally learned what all of my other bandie friends had already discovered: We were not allowed to date outside our species. I took a girl from band to that year's homecoming dance, and it wasn't a coincidence that she was a French Horn player. She did kiss on a first date. A lot.
Imagine my surprise when I found out a few days later that we were just good friends. How could this be? Hadn't I just achieved my personal breakthrough? Wasn't this my little mitzvah? Nope. But here's where the magic starts to turn: This was the girl who, a year later, gave me my first Bruce Springsteen record. What a good friend.
By the end of my senior year, I had a girlfriend. The spell had finally been broken, and I was sure that all of that patience and good behavior was going to pay off. I shouldn't have been so hasty. After the breakup of my first and most, well, first relationship, I spent the rest of the Reagan administration waiting for another shot at being "more than just good friends."
When I finally met up with my wife-to-be, we had been friends for nearly a decade. Good friends. At the wedding of her high school boyfriend, who was my good friend as well, we happily took it upon ourselves to make the sign for the bride and groom's bicycles that read "Just Married." There was only one sign we could put on the back of our car when we left the wedding.
We're still good friends. And the "just" doesn't matter.