THE START OF A SOAP?

I wrote the following piece for Kveller.com.  I thought I was being reasonable.  I didn't expect there to be a controversy.  I was wrong.  Please read and chime in with your thoughts....

We talk a lot here at Kveller about mom friends. Where to find them, how to make them, the care and feeding of… The ritual of proper playground hook-up etiquette has become a mating dance of its own, with questions of when to call, what it means when they don’t call back, and the fear of coming off as seeming too needy.

But, the reality is that, in the year 2013, odds are that the parent you end up hitting it off with by the sandbox, the one you begin looking forward to seeing to help break up the monotony of your day, the one you start fantasizing about asking out for coffee without the kids so you guys can really talk and maybe become real friends with–sans sandbox–could well be not a fellow mom, but a dad.

And then you’re faced with that infamous “When Harry Met Sally” dilemma: Can men and women (and/or moms and dads) ever be just friends?

You’d think I’d be an expert on the subject. I wrote a whole book about it in 2000, When a Man Loves a Woman (though, considering it was a romance novel, you can guess for yourselves what the answer proved to be there).

The fact is I’ve always had male friends. I was the little girl who preferred playing with boys over girls in elementary school (baseball beats dress up). I had guy friends in high school and in college and on the job. And because I work in television, that often meant late-night editing sessions, work-related black tie events, and even overnight, week-long trips to exotic locations like Albany, NY and Huntington, West Virginia. Where my stories would often begin with, “So, it was 2 in the morning and I turned to So-and-So and said…”

My husband has always had women friends, too. Some of them even pre-date me and it’s not unusual, if I’m out of town, for me to call my husband at 2 a.m. only to hear, “Oh, So-and-So is here, we’re watching movies. Say hi!”

Now, it is very possible (and has been frequently suggested) that I am too stupid to live. But, I prefer to trust my husband. Just like he prefers to trust me.

Read the entire piece - and the comments it inspired - at: http://www.kveller.com/blog/parenting/can-moms-dads-be-just-friends/