Honesty is such a lonely word.

Because no matter how old you get, when it comes to relationships, you still have no idea what you’re doing.

There are two people in my life who have, for as long as I can remember, had the most difficult time being honest. I’m not sure if it’s just honesty that’s the real problem here, or if it’s also due to their combined inability (let’s call them Jack and Jill) to figure out what they actually want. While I know that men and women love, and are very good at, playing games, and that they are so intrinsically different that most of the time I wonder how it is that relationships ever work at all – but you’d think that after all these two have been through (read: heartbreak, waiting out other relationships, drunken text messages, hours spent on carefully crafted emails, planned weekends away, trying to figure out what planned weekend away meant, more text messages…), that they’d want to capitalize on all this effort that they’ve expensed on not making the relationship work, and actually just be together.

But then again, just being together is difficult. No one seems to really know how to make that Being Together thing happen. Before the be-all-end-all of marriage, there isn’t a handbook, a guide, a signed contract that you can simply hand to the other person and say “here, sign this and we’ll, you know, like be together.” However Being Together inevitably takes having to communicate to the other person that you do, indeed, want to be together - and we all know that telling someone how you really feel is the emotional equivalent to standing in the middle of a busy street stark naked.

Remember when you were twelve, and that guy who was playing footsie with you under the table in the library sent his friend to ask you how you really felt about him? And then once the courage was worked up, Footsie Guy actually came up to you and said something like, “Hey Sara, look at me! I’ve got arms! Do think you'd want to be like, boyfriendgirlfriend maybe?” Maybe we all need to go back to such simplistic ways of communicating instead of spending months trying say that exact thing we feel without actually saying anything at all.

Jack and Jill are not, I believe, the first people in the world to forgo honesty. Women are too afraid to want what they want at the risk of losing the man they want - so they keep their mouths shut and pretend that “this is whatever it is, ok?” is enough for them. But it’s never just whatever it is. It’s always more or not enough and they’re left waiting it out, waiting and hoping to see if the other person will eventually grow up and mature to the level of the normal human understanding that when it comes to peoples hearts, “whatever it is,” isn’t anything to hang your hopes on.

And while I know men typically stay away from anything having to do with the words “feelings,” “commitment,” and “laundry,” as though they were black death itself, I find it hard to believe that they can be so afraid of honesty that they’d be willing to risk their own happiness because of it.

What we need to do is try to get back to our emotional roots, before we were exposed to the cruel world of rejection and loneliness as adults, back to the time when playground politics ruled and liking someone was as real and straightforward as PB&J.

Because isn’t honesty, when it comes to how we feel, really the best policy? Wouldn’t you hate to be Jack in ten years, waking up only to realize that you had spent the majority of your early-adulthood bouncing around between relationships you didn’t really care about just because you were too afraid (or too stupid) to go after what you really wanted?

Tsk tsk. It’s time to speak up - Footsie Guy wouldn’t approve of anything less.