Vainglorious Vicissitudes

Huh. I have no brothers and don't think I've ever had that "automatically-sexless" thing happen, but I guess I can begin to see how it would. I'm still not at all familiar with the sense of feeling threatened by the knowledge that someone wants to be more than friends, though, possibly because in all the times I've had a friend who wanted to be more, they've never gone about it in a threatening way. Sometimes I felt guilty because I couldn't give them what they wanted, but I never felt like they were pushing me. And the feeling of betrayal I really don't grok--after all, I've had a lot of friendships start because one of us had a crush on the other, and that doesn't seem deceptive to me, because it wasn't like we were pretending to want each other's friendship--we genuinely did want it, whether or not a romantic relationship also happened. It seems like the "betrayed" feeling would have to arise from a "you're either friends or you're sexually interested in each other, and you can't be both" paradigm, which is very foreign to me, and even more so to some people I know who will only date people they've been friends with for a while first.