Full question:

Dear Ibby,
What do you do when you have crazy sexual tension with a good friend and want to act on it, but don’t want to ruin the friendship? There's some sort of attraction happening between my best guy friend and, and I want him … I just don't want anything to change between us.

Sex doesn’t always ruin the friendship, my little tater tot. However, whether or not you can stay friends afterwards does depend on who you both are as people and what your friendship is like. How much do you value the friendship over the potential sex you’d have?

If you’re both capable of compartmentalizing the sexual attraction you have for each other as a separate thing from your friendship, fucking each other might not be the worst thing in the world. It’s nice to bone a person you already know and like and trust. If you can keep feelings out of it (and I mean actually keep them out, not just say you can so you can have sex), then there’s no reason why you both can’t give in to temptation if you do it in a caring and adaptive way.

That means mutually acknowledging the attraction and talking about how that makes both of you feel. It also means setting up boundaries. Are you going to just pound the shit out of each other and never do it again? Do you want to be fuck buddies? What do you want out of this? If you’re not willing to have that conversation and you’d rather just jump each other’s bones, then you’re gambling — you might stay friends, and you might not.

However, I’d only recommend dipping your toes in this semen-y water if you’re okay with exploring some sort of change in your relationship, because it will happen … for better or for worse. It might be that the sex leads to sudden emotional involvement, it might mean you simply creating a set of rules and boundaries that allows you to fuck, or it might mean things are awkward between you for a while.

If you’re willing to take that risk though, friend sex could lead to some really wonderful places. You can’t throw a rock two feet without hitting a couple who started off as friends and eventually started dating, and I’d daresay these couples tend to be pretty compatible — you’ve got mutual friends, overlapping tastes, and intersecting lifestyles that make close friendship possible, so it’s not that far of a leap to alter your relationship for romance.

However! If you’re not willing to take the risk and you’re 100 percent sure sex will ruin friendship, don’t worry. I’ve got another option for you: sex friends. Not sex partners … sex friends. Let me differentiate. You fuck a sex partner. You don’t fuck a sex friend … but you do sexual things together. You can act out your own personal brand of depravity in each other’s presence, and engage in whatever sorts of sexual activities you like together, without actually doing them with each other.

For example: group sex. You could have a little orgy or cuckold deal where you fuck other people near each other, but don’t actually engage yourselves. That way, you can act on the sexual energy you feel between you without compromising your friendship by going overboard on the personal boundaries of sex, feelings, and friendship. Give it a try. Merry Christmas.