Hey, Chicago readers: If you can make it up to Evanston this Monday, I’ll be giving a talk titled “Escape from the Planet of the Friend Zone,” exploring some of the mythology of this dreaded place. The talk, like my talk two years ago, will be part of Northwestern’s Annual Sex Week, sponsored by the College Feminists. (The talk itself is cosponsored by NU’s Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault.)
It’s at 7 PM in Kresge Hall 4365, which is on the Southern end of campus, near “the rock.” (Here’s a map.) If you’re taking the el, get off at the Foster stop and head east; then a little ways south when you hit campus. I’ll check about parking for non-students and provide details later.
The last time I gave a talk during Northwestern’s Sex Week, some MRAs got a little overexcited and started making up things about what they assumed my talk was about. (They were wrong.) So, just to make clear: I will not be teaching impressionable college students “how to have good sex,” except insofar as I will be talking about how sexist and self-defeating the concept of the Friend Zone is, which means it’s possible that some dude could attend the lecture and decide to stop whining about getting stuck in the Friend Zone, and thus improve his romantic and sexual prospects with that one simple step.
I haven’t finished writing the talk yet, so if any of you have any thoughts on the Friend Zone — or the closely related topic of the “nice guy” — let me know in the comments below.
I’m also curious about what role the concept of the Friend Zone plays in your everyday lives, so I’m going to spit out a bunch of questions that I may address in the talk and may ask the students as well. I’d be interested in your answers.
Have you ever been put in a situation that you or other people might describe as the Friend Zone? Whose fault do you think it was? Have you ever been accused of putting someone else in the Friend Zone? Did you find this insulting? Has someone else, through their own obsequiousness, put themselves in the Friend Zone with you?
Is the Friend Zone a male thing or are there a significant number of women and girls who find themselves friendzoned as well?
Does the notion of the Friend Zone grow out of male entitlement? Is it a fundamentally manipulative to try to pressure a woman into romance and sex? Or does it grow out of male awkwardness — the inherently difficult situation of shy or perhaps socially awkward guys who are still nonetheless expected to be the ones who pursue women rather than the other way around, as MRA types might argue?
When did the term start getting used? The concept is certainly not new, but I don’t think the term is that old. When did you all first start hearing it?
How can guys (or gals) get out of the Friend Zone?
Can a Friend Zone situation — by which I mean one in which one person is romantically interested and the other isn’t — be transformed into a real friendship, or will the different feelings/expectations of the two people make this impossible?
Alternately, can a Friend Zone situation turn into a real romance?
Is the Friend Zone really a useful concept at all? There are very few relationships — platonic, romantic or purely sexual — in which each partner feels the exact same way about the other. There are mismatches all the time. Shouldn’t we just learn to roll with it? Maybe the answer to the old When Harry Met Sally question — can a man be friends with a woman he’s attracted to? — is, “why the hell not?”
Unrequited crushes I had a lot.
But for a slightly more interesting story: I managed to “friend zone” a guy thanks to his mom in college. We were getting along well and sat talking in a park just outside the apartment complex he and his family lived a lot. Well, from this his mother gathered that I have a romantic interest in him*… when I finally heard this back, well, I got out a “What? He is not even my type.” and burst out laughing. We grew apart later, partially thanks to this making any talk incredibly awkward.
* Hungary is incredibly patriarchal so that he wouldn’t be interested in me probably never occurred to her. He wasn’t, he had an unrequited crush on a different girl in our gaming group.
A few years ago everyone was talking about the Ladder Theory of the friend zone, see here: http://www.the-spearhead.com/2009/10/26/ladder-theory/ — http://www.laddertheory.com/
Never heard anything about it since, but maybe it’s useful? The supposed advantage of the ladder theory over generic friend zone complaints was that it was like an accurate model of male female relationships. It’s all nonsense of course, but I think the ladder theory at least pretends to be a funny explanation and leaves out some of the bitterness, so maybe it’s a nice way to introduce the subject?
I feel like i remember seeing it in a Chris Rock routine before Friends, but I wouldn’t know exactly because I freakin’ hated Friends when I was a teenager.
It’s in one of his really, really early breakout routines.
I dislike the concept of the friendzone because I have previously behaved badly when I was rejected. I wasn’t angry but didn’t give the person space. I guess I thought I was being a friend but hasn’t moved on in my head.
I’m getting better now and working on improving myself. I think the concept of the friendzone discourages this. It says you have been treated badly and are the victim. It doesn’t encourage you to improve and in fact encourages you to behave worse. I think it is a destructive and too easily adopted attitude.
I have never considered myself to be friendzoned. However the concept is prevelant among some of the guys I met and I have become reluctant to form friendships with men as I’m unable to provide sex.
Before I heard of “friendzoning” as something you do to someone, I used to think of it as something you do to yourself. As in, by being completely non-sexual around someone, you kill any potential sexual attraction they might have had for you until “they don’t think of you that way”. Obviously a lot of the time there isn’t any sexual attraction anyway, but if there is some and it disappears I assumed it was from one or both not expressing themselves.
When it does work like this, I can see why it would happen to men more than women just because men are “supposed” to express their sexual interest and women not so much.
I thought that’s what they were talking about on Friends though. Not that Rachael might make a conscious decision that Ross was no good to date, just that if she had to spend too long suppressing her own attraction she’d smother it. I know that when I decide not to be attracted to someone (for eg if they are unavailable) and I’m successful, I can’t get it back.
I think once the internet is fond of a certain concept it will start to be universally applied. So every interaction with women will on some level start to involve the friend zone according to mainstream internet gender theoreticians. And as a result it will become a more and more shallow and meaningless concept that you can hardly say something concrete about because everyone has a personal interpretation of it. Some people acknowledge the friend zone but don’t think it’s bad, some people say it doesn’t exist, some people think it’s proof that women are evil, and so on.
Personally I think it’s a stupid concept, it feels completely dismissive of a personal experience I had where I ended up being close friends with a girl I had a crush on. I’m very happy for that friendship (and it was hard-fought I guess) and I don’t like random people thoughtlessly using the word friend zone to describe any of it as it makes a mockery of the specific circumstances that make it meaningful to me by turning it into a generic complaint about women. Nevertheless, I’ve told about this girl on the internet before and I even received “sympathy” for being “friendzoned”. (wth)
Ah, the Spearhead, aptly demonstrating once again that the people they actively hate the most is women and themselves. Yes, internet misogynists, all men everywhere are utterly incapable of forming any attachment to any object without that attachment being based on their sexual interest.
Oh but women have “Friendships”, and this is a cause of mayhem and chaos! MAYHEM AND CHAOS!
Holy hell, two different tracks of advancement? so much confusion! I’m a man! I can only handle a strict linear progression of terms over time and no, don’t talk to be about the
And this is true. With the concept resting solely on “If you never do anything to indicate you’re at all interested, other people won’t know you’re interested”, the idea of a friend zone you can put yourself in sort of makes sense. I still somewhat icky about it, mentally, but the idea has a kind of logic to it, and it doesn’t get all bitter. If you never indicate desires, it’s easy to be perceived as an awesome friend, why else are you hanging out so much and doing all these awesome things.
It ends up being a carte blanche for people to apply pressure to the person doing the “friend zoning”, as if they were consciously attempting to hold someone in some state of bondage.
Isn’t that right,
Newjim?
The intentional act of penis bondage (“She knows, but she’s abusing all those sweet free favors”) is a pretty integral component of the modern idea of the friend zone. You are losing out, and you are being abused by this coy manipulator that strings you along. And that’s not necessarily gendered, although the surrounding mythos often is.
It just… bugs me. It’s like this social poison that people can start inflicting on others by just speaking about it, and suddenly everyone ends up like “Wait, am I being used with the hope of sex? Oh god no!”.
Although that may be because of my experiences with people readily willing to believe the worst of others.
OK, I’ve never posted here even though I’ve been lurking since forever… But since we’re talking friend zone here… Maybe David should interview my boyfriend. Why? Just because he’s lived for years right in the boiling hellish candle scented dark evil pits of the friend zone and LIVED to tell the tale! He was something next to a brother to me for years… And we’ve been dating for 5 years now. He’s done it by using words and being plain honest with me… It’s like magic or something.
Ps: We’ve met online when we were about 13 years old, been friends for like 10 years. I’m dating my very best friend, and loving it! I’m kidding about the interview though lol
I never watched Friends but I do recall knowing about “the friend zone” many years ago. I’ve a notion the phrase died out then got revived with a vengeance and a new meaning, becoming widespread about 4-5 years ago. Originally it was benign. You started out in the friend zone and unless you did something to show yourself date-worthy, that was where you remained. Which is the sense being used in the Friends episode being quoted. AFAIR it was unisex.
Nowadays the meaning has been reversed. Someone (usually female) has actively put you (usually male) in the Zone, rather than it being where you start out. By putting the focus on the rejector in this way it removes the onus on the rejectee of having to strive to win the desired one’s regard that was present in the original usage. One can see why it would be attractive to MRAs, though I’ve a suspicion it was actually PUAs who revived the term and gave it its new meaning.
I don’t know about the term “friend zone,” but certainly when I was in college in the early 90s, we spoke of “I just want to be friends” being the kiss of death to your romantic pursuits. And my friends and I felt this was a bad thing.
I was generally timid and scrawny and kind of hated that about myself. My dislike of the “friend zone” wasn’t just about me and the girl I wanted to date. There was also an element of comparison in my own mind between myself and the guys these women apparently found sexually attractive. They were generally bigger, stronger, and louder than me. That fed into my unhappiness about myself.
It wasn’t so much, I don’t think, an unhappiness about being friends. If these women just weren’t into romantic relationships with guys at all, then the friendships would be an unmitigated positive. It’s when the situation prompted me to use these women as a metric for comparing my own self-worth to the worth of other guys that my emotions became negative. Once I was feeling those negative emotions, I projected some of them inward, but I can’t say I didn’t project them onto the women involved. Which was unfair. But there is something ego-soothing about wallowing in the “women like assholes” trope. That way your worth isn’t less than the other guy — the measuring tool simply hasn’t been properly calibrated. (And, yes, the notion of using women as a method of keeping score is fucked and unhealthy, but I don’t think it’s exactly rare.)
I don’t think this dynamic lasted very long for me. Maybe from ages 16-19. Before that, I wasn’t trying to date girls in any serious way. After that, I had a series of long term relationships, culminating in one with the woman who became my wife. As a 40 year old man, it seems silly in retrospect that the emotions should have been so strong back then. But 40 has a way of forgetting what 19 feels like.
@ Kim
I had that happen once, so I get what you’re saying. I met a girl at college who I had epic pants feels for the minute we met, and I later came to find out it was reciprocated, but she was already dating someone else. So I squelched the flames. It took time, but we were able to still hang out and have an awesome time together without any awkwardness. Eventually she broke up with her girlfriend for completely unrelated reasons, and we took the opportunity to try to date. It was fun, but the epic pants feels never returned. I cut it short, telling her she was better off looking for someone else. It just so happened there was a super cute girl with a crush on her. They hooked up and have been together for six years now! Yay happy endings!
Being bi, I don’t think the friend zone (as a mythology) exists. If it did, I couldn’t have any friends, guy or gal, without one or both of us being stuck in the ‘friend zone’ at some time. I think two people who like each other as friends can sometimes also find each other attractive (and therefore date each other), but sometimes only one of them feels that way. It’s up to them, as adults, to talk it out and decide whether or not the pants feels are good or bad, why, and what, if anything, to do about it. No friend zone mythos required.
LOL, pants feels. I think I stole that from Captain Awkward.
Speaking of Captain Awkward, here’s a few essays from her site on the subject. I’m sure most of the regulars are already familiar with her, so this is mostly for the stumblers and new peeps.
http://captainawkward.com/?s=friend+zone&submit=Search
My brother honestly didn’t understand what makes FZ such an awful concept, but I finally managed to explain it to him thusly ;
“People do not have a switch in their brain that they can just flick on or off in order to feel attracted to someone or not. Friend zone is an awful concept because it assumes that the target of the “zoned one’s” attractions could, if they wanted to, feel attracted to them. It’s not possible to just decide whether or not you fall in love with someone. If you don’t, you just don’t. And no amount of “it being cruel” or not making sense will not change that.
Friend zoning kinda implies that it’s unfair and somehow intentional when someone who you are nice to doesn’t return the affections romantically or physically, even if they don’t feel the same attraction. And that’s awful.”
I really hate it when people think a person made a bad _decision_ for dating X instead of Y. It’s not really a decision when it’s about love and attraction, no matter how much “better” the other suitor might have been. It’s common to see in media, where a female character has more than one potential love interest and she is often viewed as a bitch if she chooses the one who isn’t the audience favorite or something. Usually the entire argument is “that whore went with the better looking / richer / other guy despite this guy being more sympathetic and/or nicer to her and tried his best to win her over. ” It just seems to me like it’s some sort of game to be won instead of about what the woman might want, and the wrong guy won.
Not to mention the whole implication that being friends with someone is a bad thing if you happen to be attracted to said friend. Sure, it can suck, but if you actually cared, you wouldn’t feel so entitled to their attention that you couldn’t let go. Friendship is not an insult, or a punishment… Being friends is a good thing. Friendship is valuable as it is, it’s not just a step to take in order to get to someone’s pants.
i’m a 21-year-old woman and I have totally been “friend-zoned” by a guy before. When I met him, I was about 18 and he was a little older. Being young and naive, I thought he was perfect for me just because we had some common interests and I assumed that we would start dating. We hung out as friends all the time but it never progressed beyond that. When he started dating some other, rather pretty girls that WEREN’T me, it definitely fucked with my head. It’s an awkward situation, and I’m lucky that I didn’t completely humiliate myself with my actions afterward.
Who was ultimately at fault for my embarrassment and hurt feelings? ME! Myself, of course! Looking back, I can see how entitled and and silly I was being by ASSUMING that he would be attracted to me just because I liked him and we liked the same music. Unrequited love is painful, yes, but it taught me a valuable lesson. As for the guy who “friend-zoned” me, well, we’re still friends.
Have you ever seen that awful show that was on MTV called the Friendzone? My friend, Jaci, was actually featured on that show and was rejected by a guy at the end. Lol.
When I was single I was accused more than once of putting men in the FriendZone, although that term was not yet in use. It always puzzled me: if I liked a guy but was not attracted to him, what else would I do but be his friend? Only later did I realize that the resentment comes from a place of entitlement: “I am attracted to you, so you have an obligation to give me a romantic chance!” Yeahno, sorry, I don’t.
The way I see it, the “Friendzone” is essentially a way to deny women sexual agency and punish women for making choices about their romantic and sexual lives.
First of all it says that women owe men who perform a Patriarchal idea of decent behaviour (ie. not raping them, maybe buying them things) sex and relationships.
This idea actually has very deep roots, having studied Medieval Courtly Love, men “earned” womens “love” by performing acts of chivalry and if he was considered to have performed enough acts then she owed him to bestow her love on him, and if she did not she was considered to be treating him cruelly.
It’s the same thing at heart, men performing a patriarchal and male-created set of behaviours which women are required to reciprocate with sex and romantic attachments.
(One day I will write that article “Knights and Nice Guys: Courtly Love, the Friendzone and the Medieval European Origins of Rape Culture”)
It also denies women sexual agency and denies that women have sexual preferences and dismisses them.
It says that women should “give him a chaaaance” when the man has performed an adequate number of “nice” deeds. The fact that she most likely not sexually attracted to him is not of any concern. Her desires are not of any concern. She should have sex with him anyway. She should enter a relationship with a man she has no sexual desire for but god forbid she “with-hold” sex and you can bet he’ll be complaining if she does not adequately perform his idea of how women should behave in bed.
Essentially the “Friendzone” is designed to pressure women into sex and relationships they do not want and to punish them if they resist this pressure.
Also, I really dislike that common whine that “Friendzoned” guys do which is to complain about women who have “friendzoned” them saying “I wish I could find a guy like you” and being like “Stupid woman! I’m a guy like me! But you ignore me! Gendered slur gendered slur stupid gendered slur women gendered slur”.
This at heart is again about denying women agency. Unsurprisingly, the people who I am friends with and the people I date often have a lot in common, and the qualities I look for in a friend have a lot of overlap with what I look for in a partner. I have plenty of friends who are “a guy like” the sort of person I would date, but it doesn’t mean I want to date them.
So what it is saying is that women do have preferences then they should be forced to date anyone who fits those preferences regardless of whether they are actually attracted sexually or romantically to them.
@ historophilia
I would totes read the hell out of that essay.
That’s exactly how I feel about it (even when the genders are reversed or the same), that it comes out of a concept that relationships are transactions. “I spent X amount of time/effort/dinner on you, now you HAVE to give me what I want!”
The ‘friend zone’ isn’t this thing that exists ‘out there’ that you can fall into, it’s a place a person constructs and puts themselves into (but claims the other person put them there on purpose) as a way to protect their ego and defend their sense of entitlement.
@FromAfar: pants feels! ha!!!! I love it.
@historophilia:
I second formafar2013. That sounds interesting.
Incidentally, on another topic entirely, anyone have any recommendations of books to look into on medival history or just history in general? My local library has a pretty stunted collection, since it specializes more in fiction literature and is a little starved for non-fiction and googling gets a lot of varied results.
(Danish language aside – “Skøn” means either “Beauty” (Du er skøn), “an estimation” (Mit skøn er) or “fictional literature” (Skøn-litteratur). I find that amusing )
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Assuming the idea if based on a certain, I guess chivalric mindset and certain patriarchal standards is interesting though. The old stand-by of “Kindness coins” gets kind of interesting then, because it becomes a way of reframing the rejection of someone else as a failure of them to live up to the epic quest for love of the person being rejected – I did all these nice things, and verily, the heartless she-dragon doth mine advances still –
Yay! Half the population can become incidental objects in someone’s quest for a relationship, defined either by submission or failure to properly follow the protocol.
David, this is fabulous! I wish I could attend the talk. I also wish someone had given one like it when I was in college. :p
Will need to read all the comments here when I’m not rushing to work, as I am right now, because I’m sure there are fabulous things there too.
Seriously, though, David, I thank you for doing this. Great thing to do for young women.
Random linguistic trivia from my native language to continue the thought: in Hungarian “fictional literature” is “szépirodalom” -> “szép” means “pretty” or “nice” and “irodalom” is “literature”.
I was thinking about the poor men who do hang around a woman who sort of doles out just enough hope to keep him hanging. I agree it happens, though it’s not nearly so common as MRA mythology seems to believe. Takes energy, resources, and strategic skills on her part. (Personally, I would rather be playing minecraft.)
Anyway, to my mind the stereotypical corresponding female plight is getting into an ill defined FWB arrangement, where she wants more but does no more than hint, while the dude is evasive or oblivious. She is hoping that if she is pretty and nice and giving enough, he’ll eventually come out and commit at whatever level she is hoping for. She is not brave or self-aware enough to ask and face getting shot down, so the whole thing drags on for months or years.
Maybe he has no desire to commit, at least at the time in his life or with her, but he knows if he comes out and says that he there is apt to be a scene and the regular supply of sex will dry up. So both of them just keep their mouths shut about it til it all turns spectacularly ugly one fine Tuesday afternoon.
Well, OK, stringer-alongers suck, and they can do it for a lot of reasons. Maybe they assume in good faith that you are fine with the situation, maybe you aren’t communicating about what you want, maybe they are sociopaths who get off on using other people, maybe it’s something in the middle where they vaguely suspect you want more than they can give but don’t care to rock a comfortable boat unless they have to.
But at the end of the day it’s up to you to look out for your own emotional heath in relationships, innit? The longer you hang around “hoping” the other person will change their mind, the uglier it is when it all blows up.
I think it also happens that one person IS actually crystal clear about what their intentions are but the other person has a great case of selective listening and chooses to keep hanging around nursing wounded hopes/pride for an embarrassing amount of time.
All you can do is decide what you really want and stop laying there getting walked all over. You do not have to conclude “men are dogs” or “women are subhuman” to stop getting used if that is going on.
No paranoid theories required.
Historaphilia – I concur, that does sound interesting. It made me think of the song “Greensleeves” in an entirely new light.
Also, to be unkind to some degree, I used to believe that women don’t want sex.
Then I grew up.
@Fibinachi, is it medieval history in particular that interests you? Any other areas of history especially? I can rustle up some reccomendations for you 🙂
Medieval history, yes!
Also Late Renaisance, early and late iron ages, typical roman periods. I’d love some sources on the Americas before contact with Europa, but those are kind of scarce. Greek classical period? Non-European history in general would be great.
The thing is, I’m not a historian, so my “Well that sounds interesting” is sort of stunted.
Anything you find worth recommending – I read broadly and quickly, so I can devour fair stacks of books / material.