Yesterday I was hanging out with one of my favorite families, catching Sexy Wife and Hubby up on my life, and I got to take a few short cuts because Sexy Wife happens to be a reader. However, with two adorable kids and her own growing business empire, she has fallen behind a bit and hadn’t been aware of the “new name for FWB” contest. As I got her up to speed, Hubby just listened with intrigue. We have a working relationship so he’s not used to hearing this side of me and he knows he’s not allowed to read the blog, so he was both amused and disturbed.

“So,” he asked, “Women have calculations and percentages and labels?” This was in response to me referring to Friend With Benefits by his label and not by his actual name, which called for an explanation… which I gave. And FWB being my first “friend with benefits” led into the “boy toy” definition, which totally confused Hubby, so I explained it liked this:

“You know how on The Biggest Loser, when a 300 pound person loses 10 pounds it’s not worth the same percentage of weight loss to the team than if a 192 pound person loses 10 pounds? Well it’s the same thing with boy toys. When a girl is 29 and the guy is 21 it’s not as big of a percentage as when a girl is 40 and the guy is 25. It’s a different score.”

Then I went on to explain how with boy toys, they must be either dumb or angry because the smaller the age difference percentage the greater chance you have of getting emotionally attached, so it’s important to find a boy toy with major flaws that would never allow for attachment. It’s like dating a hostile uterus if you don’t want kids.

Hubby was trying to keep up with the names, the math and the bizarre metaphors, and that’s when we got to FWB, and Sexy Wife and I were discussing the changing nature of our relationship. You see, Sister keeps insisting that I’m falling in love with him and I’m going to marry him and not come home from my Gypsy road trip. I was explaining to Sexy Wife how ridiculous it was for Sister to be worrying about that at this point, as we’ve been Friends With Benefits for less than two months. EVERY romantic comedy girl knows that there’s a magical spell over the first four months called The Honeymoon Period, where everything is pheromones and romance and butterflies, and the ‘real people’ in the relationship don’t show up until all that fairy dust wears off.

Hubby chimed in again around this time to get the whole math/month/timing down straight. Once he appeared to understand Sexy Wife and I went on to discuss the changes in the “benefits package.” It is clear that something is changing, but again, it’s too soon to call him a boyfriend. I told her about Climber Gal’s suggestion of Lover Boy based on the Dirty Dancing scene, and we were oooing and ahhhing about what a cute name that was, but still not quite it, when Hubby interjected, “Why don’t you call him IC?” Sexy Wife and I turned to him with “huh?” expressions on our faces, “for It’s Complicated.”

I looked at Sexy Wife, she looked at me. I raised an eyebrow, she raised one in return. “Say that again…” I requested.

“Just call him IC for It’s Complicated,” Hubby repeated.

“Ooooo that’s good,” I said to Sexy Wife as she nodded her head in agreement with a touch of pride for her husband’s brilliance.

I declared that Friend With Benefits had a new name “It’s Complicated AKA IC”. And while Hubby was happy to have helped (because he’s a man and men love to be problem solvers for women and we love them for it), he was more concerned for his three-year-old son who had been sitting with us, hoping that none of this crazy ‘girl-talk’ was sinking in on some unconscious level, which upon becoming a man would resurface and scar him for life.

©2011