Friday night blues

Here it is, my Friday night blues. The melancholy, sometimes acute sadness, intense loneliness, that has been hitting me, like clockwork, almost every Friday evening for the past two or three months. 

Last weekend it didn’t happen but that was only because I went on a camping & climbing trip with a group of friends, heading out on Friday early afternoon and carpooling with one of them. Spending the whole weekend in the fun, pleasant company of nice people, good friends, and moreover outdoors in nature, spared me from the sadness and loneliness that usually washes over me on Friday evenings, lingering at least through my Saturdays. 

These past two weeks have been particularly good for me. After crashing harder than usual on the Friday of two weeks ago, feeling extremely distressed emotionally, my oldest climbing buddy’s visit on that Sunday, the care & love he showed me in his concern for my radio silence over the weekend, and the open acknowledgement of his physical/sexual attraction towards me, all helped to lift my spirits. Which were then further lifted by two interesting and successful weeks at work, and the climbing/camping trip. 

But almost every Friday evening, as soon as the week’s busyness ends, as soon as I start relaxing and my head is no longer filled with tasks from my “to-do” list, as soon as my nonstop go-go-go mode slows down, I crash emotionally. Loneliness overcomes me, sadness washes over me and sometimes grips me so tight that I can hardly function. On these Friday nights all I want, all I need, is to be held. And ideally, not by just anyone: to be held by my father. The longing is so intense that it’s almost physically painful. And knowing that I cannot be held in that way makes me want to isolate. 

Maybe being held by a close guy friend, a friend with benefits, could help — indeed, on that Sunday nearly two weeks ago my buddy said that we would have held me on the previous Friday night. But would that be enough? And would it be OK? 

The embrace, the comfort, the love I long for from my father is platonic, of course. And it’s unbalanced, or one-way, because it’s the boy, the child in me who craves that hug, that cradling. But that’s not the type of comfort I would get from a guy friend: it would either be not affectionate enough, if it were platonic; or it would slide into sexual, if it were with someone who feels attracted to me, like my buddy who comforted me two weeks ago. So in the former case, I wouldn’t get my real, deep need met; and in the latter, I would be getting a different need met, and maybe in a way that wouldn’t be fair towards the (other) guy involved…