Conditional Proximity

Friendship is not sacred. It is not clean. It is not protected by invisible law. It survives only as long as it remains useful. The moment people start talking about boundaries as moral objects, the structure collapses. Enjoyment is the only thing holding it together. Nothing else.

I interact with people through shared use of time. Walking, talking, touching, silence, friction. I do not elevate one activity above another. I do not pretend one requires purity while another is mechanical. That hierarchy exists only to protect discomfort. Once you accept that intimacy is an action rather than a transformation, the confusion disappears.

Men fail at this early. They cannot speak without comparison leaking into every sentence. Every exchange becomes an audit. Who is ahead. Who is behind. Who dominates the room. They perform masculinity as if someone is scoring it. Conversation rots under that pressure. Nothing accurate survives.

With women, the exchange is different. Desire is named. Interest is acknowledged. Aversion is stated without decoration. The interaction stays operational. No scoreboard. No ranking. Things move or they stop. That clarity is misinterpreted as softness. It is the opposite. It is efficiency.

People insist that intimacy corrupts friendship. That once bodies cross, something breaks. They invent categories to justify this belief. Friend. Lover. Partner. As if movement between states triggers contamination. This is clerical thinking. It treats interaction as bureaucracy. I refuse it.

If I enjoy speaking with someone, that is enough. If physical closeness occurs, nothing changes structurally. The relationship does not upgrade. It does not deepen by default. It does not demand new obligations. It simply expands what is possible between us. Panic enters only when people believe intimacy grants authority.

Exclusivity is where honesty dies. The moment a relationship demands silence, distortion becomes mandatory. You are required to misreport perception. You must amputate reaction. You sit across from someone and pretend your nervous system has stopped functioning. This is not respect. It is rehearsal.

I will not do that. I will not deny recognition. I will not suppress attraction to preserve comfort. I do not accept agreements that require me to edit reality. Any bond that survives only through omission is already decomposing.

This is why formal coupling always felt smaller to me than friendship. Friendship allows accuracy. Coupling demands performance. Friendship tolerates friction. Coupling punishes it. Friendship permits drift. Coupling requires maintenance rituals to prevent exposure. I choose what allows speech.

Scarcity distorts behavior. When access feels limited, men contort themselves. They calculate tone. They dilute opinion. They suppress directness. They believe desire must be coaxed rather than stated. That belief poisons interaction. Need is legible. It always leaks.

When pressure disappears, language changes. Words shorten. Hesitation evaporates. People respond to this shift immediately. Not because it is charming, but because it is rare. Most never reach this state. They remain trapped negotiating for permission to exist openly.

Desperation ruins accuracy. It introduces strategy where none is needed. It turns interaction into theater. Once the hunger drops, the scripts dissolve. Conversation becomes procedural again. Truth reenters without announcement.

I do not separate intimacy from conversation. Both are exchanges of information. One uses language. The other uses proximity. Neither guarantees continuity. Neither creates obligation. Confusing activity with contract is how people trap themselves.

Ambiguity corrodes interaction. Unspoken desire warps every exchange. People orbit it, adjust posture around it, deny it while organizing their behavior around its gravity. Removing that ambiguity clarifies everything. Whatever remains afterward is real.

Some cultures tolerate this clarity. Others pathologize it. Moral language appears wherever discomfort needs enforcement. Words like betrayal, respect, commitment are deployed to silence perception. I do not argue with these terms. I simply avoid structures that require them.

Ownership poisons affection. The moment someone believes access grants authority, curiosity dies. Surveillance replaces interest. Desire becomes obligation. I watch this happen repeatedly. The participants call it stability. The air drains anyway.

I do not promise permanence. I do not offer exclusivity. I do not disguise this. Some walk away immediately. Others stay until they realize I will not convert. Both outcomes are acceptable. I am not here to optimize compatibility.

Everything between people is an exchange, whether acknowledged or not. Pretending otherwise does not elevate it. It obscures the cost. Traditional romance hides its accounting until resentment surfaces. Then people act surprised by the invoice.

I keep terms visible. Time spent. Attention given. Energy exchanged. When something stops working, it stops. There is no appeal to sentiment to keep a dead structure moving. That refusal is often misread as detachment. It is precision.

I do not subsidize ambiguity. I do not invest in outcomes. I spend time where presence is enough. If something develops, it develops. If it does not, nothing has been lost. This preserves interaction from extraction.

Grand gestures exhaust quickly. They create imbalance. One side starts tracking. The other feels pressure. Desire collapses under obligation. I refuse that economy. I choose repeatable contact over escalation.

People accuse this posture of emptiness. They confuse freedom with absence. They believe intensity requires ownership. They believe silence equals depth. They are trained to believe this. I do not correct them.

Most people need the illusion of permanence to tolerate uncertainty. They trade visibility for reassurance. They call the trade love. The cost appears later, as dullness, as irritability, as quiet resentment that no one can name.

I do not dismantle their choices. I watch. I observe how range narrows. How language simplifies. How attention turns inward. They stop noticing the world to preserve the shape of what they chose. They call this maturity.

I refuse the premise. I keep relationships light enough to survive truth. Heavy structures break under it. This limits my options. It also preserves my sight.

I accept the constraint. Some doors remain closed. Others open briefly. Nothing stabilizes. Desire fluctuates. Connection shifts. Nothing is secured. Nothing is promised.

I speak plainly. I notice what I notice. I feel what occurs. I do not sanitize perception for continuity. This makes many arrangements impossible. I live with that.

There is no resolution here. The tension remains active. Attraction does not disappear because it is named. It sharpens. It destabilizes. It passes or it does not.

I remain inside it.