Good friends... of the opposite sex...

I have a very good friend, that I'm close to of the opposite sex, and it's not my husband (although my husband is my BESTEST friend) and I trust him with my life. I have known 'J' for over 10 years and he is like a brother to me, so much so I feel comfortable enough to whinge at him, yell at him, tell him how he infuriates me and then we laugh and it's all good again. We are proof that you can be friends with the opposite sex and there is nothing 'going on'.
The funny thing is that on this discovery of my son Jack's 'Autism' I have been researching every ASD, and that includes the very hard to diagnose 'Aspergers Syndrome'. Now I did in the past joke about my friend 'J' having AS, but now that I have read extensively on it I can pretty much diagnose him with it (he ticks ALL the boxes and he even agrees with me on this). It explains so much about him and it makes those things that use to infuriate me about him become much less infuriating. 'J' only has 2 good friends, me and a mutual friend 'V'.  All our old mutual friends ask me when I bump into them: "What happened to J? I don't hear from him anymore" and I never really knew how to respond other than he's a bit of a hermit and likes it that way. But he always was the Black Sheep.... I guess it wasn't until I came along that somebody 'got him'.
And I guess that's why we clicked... I think of myself as a bit of a Black Sheep. I'm a little left field but in a different way to J. He has always been 'monotone' whereas I have always been 'colourful', he is level headed, whereas I am very hot headed, we basically balance eachother out. But at the sametime we are very much alike, we both deal with depression and back in the day we were big 'party animals'... we would spend our whole week organising our weekend. And our weekends would be huge. I seriously don't know how we did it! But I know why we did it... we were depressed in our lives. We were lost and were trying to find meaning.
I did find meaning when I met my husband, but I never left J behind. A lot of people tend to drop their friends when they're no longer single. I wasn't going to do that to J. He is part of our family.
The true meaning of a good friend or best friend: they never bail on you, no matter what the circumstance. I feel so lucky to have J and he comes through everytime. I have a vivid memory of when I was in labour with my baby Dylan who I knew wasn't going to live (I was 20 weeks along) and my husband was asleep in the chair beside me at the hospital (he was exhausted as he does long days at work). I was high on pethidine and I felt so alone. I thought J would find the somewhat funny side of me calling him up at 1am high as a kite going through labour. He answered and chatted with me for an hour. Now that is a friend for life!
I am very lucky to have a number of amazing males in my life: my husband, my dad, my J and my 2 beautiful special boys Liam and Jack.
Oh and moral to this post is... find yourself a male friend with Aspergers and you have a friend for life *insert winky face*