40 Days of Dating: Can You Successfully Date Your Friend?

Many people have been going a little nuts over Internet sensations Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodwin, two friends, colleagues, and the creators of the blog and dating project 40 Days of Dating. If you've been reading their daily posts, then you probably are dying to know - did they stay together or break-up?

Friendships that become romantic are nothing new, but we all wonder - why is it that some friends are able to overcome their worries and progress into a long-term relationship while others are left feeling awkward and resentful of each other? As it turns out, we can watch exactly how one such friendship plays out.

The couple set the website up as an experiment, because they were both having terrible luck at finding love. Timothy was your good old-fashioned playboy, the non-commital let's-just-have-fun type who didn't want to get serious with a woman. Jessica was of course the opposite - a hopeless romantic who fell quickly for the men she dated, which eventually left her heart-broken and wondering what went wrong.

While the set-up is generic, the day-to-day observations by each of them as they proceeded to date each other exclusively over the course of 40 days, attend therapy sessions, and blog about their feelings and experiences, are pretty engaging and enlightening. Many times, they completely misread and misunderstood each other. Many times they just wanted to cut loose and run for the hills instead of proceeding with the relationship. But because they were forced to stay and try to talk with each other, to come up with a workable solution that would last the 40 days, they found themselves confronting their demons on more than one occasion.

Their weaknesses (hers being loneliness and his being vulnerability) came out, and they weren't able to hide. This is what makes their relationship progression an interesting thing for us readers. They couldn't hide behind their masks. They had to take them off, to stand in front of each other and expose their insecurities and fears. And that makes for good Internet (and maybe a good movie---it seems they have signed with an agent).

While Jessica and Timothy have seemed to grow in their experiment and slowly trust each other enough to (maybe?) fall in love, they still have a long way to go. As with many relationships, trust and commitment aren't built overnight - it's a process of discovery, of revelation. The only way to move past the infatuation stage is to really spend time and get to know each other.

So what does this mean for friends who aren't sure whether they should date? The bigger question is: will you regret it if you don't at least give it a try?