I had a rule against dating close friends. In college, two people in our group had gotten together, broken up badly, and turned every birthday and shared invitation into a negotiation. I remembered choosing where to sit so nobody would feel betrayed, remembered losing friendships that hadn’t even been part of the romance. Somewhere between those awkward dinners and graduation, I decided that some relationships mattered too much to risk changing.
When Maya first heard that rule, we were eating pizza out of the box on my living room floor. “You don’t date friends?” she asked, looking at me as though I had said I didn’t believe in windows. I called it emotional risk management, which made her laugh so hard she nearly dropped her slice. “You sound like a warning label on a ladder,” she told me, and I let the joke stand where the explanation should have been.
