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?”
I got virtually no romantic attention from the opposite sex until I went off to college (30-year-old millionaires and football teams notwithstanding).
When some men did start to pursue romance with me in college, I usually wasn’t feeling it back, and I believed I was a bad person for it. I actually bought into the “they were nice to me so I owe them a relationship” BS.
I was once told (by a third-party dude) that telling a date the honest truth that I wasn’t interested in a relationship but would welcome a friendship was akin to me pulling the wings off of a beautiful butterfly. That did not help me strengthen my resolve to be honest.
And thus I sometimes handled things in a poor way that made things worse for everyone. I actually remember telling a girl friend on the phone that someone “was a really nice guy but I can’t bring myself to be attracted to him.” And I felt there was something wrong with me for not being attracted to him. And for a while I said “maybe” rather than “no” because I honestly thought I might will myself into a “yes.” Finally I realized if the prospect of being in a relationship with him made me unhappy, it wasn’t going to be a good thing for either of us, so I finally firmly told him I wasn’t feeling it.
This was slightly before the the explosion of the World Wide Web and the Friends episode may or may not have aired yet, so the term “friend zone” was not used, but I was told that “writing him off as a ‘friend’ was doing him a grave injustice.”
My intention certainly was never to “string him along,” and believe me, I got no pleasure at all out of the situation. It really needs to be kept in mind that sometimes women are hesitant to say “no” because we are conditioned to feel we have to be kind and accommodating to others. How much better for everyone if we can all just understand it’s okay to be honest about what we want (or don’t want), and we aren’t morally obligated to be romantic with everyone who is nice and/or attentive to us. It doesn’t make us less nice people, ourselves.
BTW, that guy from college and I are on friendly terms now, 20 years later. We live far apart and don’t talk frequently, but still, it’s like we’ve both matured or something. It’s genuinely nice.
NewJim, if you read the comments more carefully, you’ll see very few people arguing that “friendzoning” never happens. The issue people have with it is the framing.
I thought that I didn’t have a personal friend zoning story. This thread is making me realize that I do have a story. It’s a tale about why one should not take a guy out of the friend zone and “give him a chance.”
In my mid-twenties I met a man from a city 5 hours away at a work convention. I’ll call him “J.” He was smart, nice and had the same political views as me. We hung out all night, had a few drinks and hooked up a little. When the weekend was over, we kept in touch. The problem was, he was physically attracted to me and I wasn’t feeling it the same way.
I have always had a tendency to be attracted to men who either aren’t attracted to me at all, or are attracted to me but not ready for a committed relationship. I don’t blame these men for rejecting me. I think there’s a big part of me that is afraid of the vulnerability that comes with a committed relationship so I seek out men who don’t threaten to take me out of my safety zone.
Around the time I met J, I was first discovering that about myself. Previously, I had thought I was just unlovable. My logic was that I should give J a chance. I told myself that he might be the right guy for me because I wasn’t attracted to him. I told myself that by being with him, I might be able to get over my issues. I told myself that I could learn to love him.
Shockingly, it didn’t work. Because I wasn’t feeling it on a physical level, when we got together for weekend visits, we would either have awkward sex, or we would start things and I would push him away because I didn’t want the awkward sex. For some reason, he still wanted to be with me. I eventually broke it off with him. A few months later, I called him in a moment of weakness and loneliness and we tried to make it work. I was wrong to do that. It didn’t work. Finally we both realized that and cut off all contact. I hope he was eventually able to find the love he deserves.
You see, by not friend zoning him, I was stringing him along. It would have been better for both of us if I had been strong enough to let him go. I didn’t mean to string him along. I wasn’t doing it to be cruel. I wasn’t doing it to get presents and dinners. I sincerely wanted it to work out because in all ways but the sexual parts he was the perfect guy for me. Ultimately it couldn’t work though. You cannot force yourself to be attracted to someone and it’s a bad idea to try. It only hurts more when you try and fail.
“Nice Guys” seem to think that we can learn to want somebody, yet paradoxically they think that women magically know whether or not we want somebody right away. They don’t understand that we are capable of being confused and weak. They think we approach relationships in cold and logical way. It’s not that easy. Sometimes people (of all genders) string someone along because they genuinely don’t know what they want.
See, what’s funny (and I say this as a guy whose high school years were marked by a massive unrequited crush that ended up turning into a friendship) is I always just assumed that “the friend zone” was just a reference to how difficult it can be to turn platonic feelings into sexual ones. But then, I never imputed conscious ill intent when women didn’t want to have sex with me, so I’m probably not the target demographic.
I’m just going to quote Kootiepatra, because I think she got it spot on:
That is exactly why I don’t like the term “friendzone”. You talk about it and suddenly as these people come up from the bowels of the internet *cough NewJim cough* start talking about how women are evil manipulators who just want things from men.
My two cents on “stringing guys along”–IME, what actually happens is she is hoping for a friendship, and he was probably the one offering to pay, which puts her at an awkward position–because there is only so loudly you are allowed to protest someone else picking up your check, you know? And it isn’t like friends don’t ever pay for their friends meals/drinks, though it is more common for special occasions.
When that happened to me, I started avoiding him, because his friendship was not worth dealing with (what I felt to be) pressure to go out with him, but I did get a free dinner out of it–because I’d agreed to go out to dinner with him, thinking it was going to be (a) more casual and (b) with a mutual friend.
(Actually, the guy was quite cute, and short, which I like, but I didn’t have time for a boyfriend and his blase attitude to a drunk driving conviction dried up any attraction I may have had for him.)
So much yes to this. Sometimes we say we are not sure about something because we really are not sure about something.
And, I’m afraid, I’m sometimes said “no” when what I really felt was “not sure at this early stage” because of my fear of stringing a guy along. Admittedly I’ve wondered on occasion if I missed out of something because of this.
Italics monster was only supposed to eat “my fear.”
Oh, and I meant to answer this question of David’s. I’ve been on both sides of this “let’s be friends” thing numerous times, so:
So… I just found out I might be friend-zoning someone.
I have this friend. We work on math homework together, cook cheap frozen pizzas, go on occasional hikes, and worked on a crazy April fools Alien bible prank for the Uni’s anthropology prof together.
We hang out a couple times a week, usually with another of my roomies, although the hikes have been solo.
They’re a pretty good hike-buddy, and that’s totally where the natural order of things seems like it should be, to me.
But, last night, one roomie asked me, “Do you think that _____ likes you?”
Then, at my clueless face, they remembered they were asking the person whose never had a crush, ever, and cannot read people AT ALL.
So, they turned to the roomie who usually forms the third leg of the hangout tripod, and asked them. And, roomie number two said, “I think ______ does.”
And, now I’m confused. Really, really confused.
I know it ‘s one of the things we tend to yell at MRAs for, but I’m really starting to want a manual for life. One entitled “How to understand people and relationships for the socially inept, without being a creeper” would be wonderful. But, it can’t ever happen, because no two people are exactly alike, and Blargh!
People are so, so confusing.
@NewJim, why do I find it hard to believe you have women friends? Because in your first post, you leap in to talk say:
So you have a pretty poor opinion of women.
Second post:
Interesting, isn’t it that of all the examples you could have come up with, your choice not a personal “this happened to me” one. It was “I just know there are all these awful women out there treating men so badly…”.
Followed by:
If you’re going to quote female friends, realistic dialogue helps. Because I doubt I’m the only one wondering WTF “the benefits of early traditional courtship and pusruit ” are.
So, in conclusion, you present as despising women and the women friends you claim to have appear to behave like jerks and use some very strange phrases. Why would I not doubt their existence?
PS I mean it, WTF are “the benefits of early traditional courtship and pusruit”?
.
Now if NewJim’s women friends had admitted to deliberately keeping men friends hanging around even though knowing those men still hoped a sexual relationship because, oh, I don’t know, lots of less than nice reasons like:
It’s an ego rub, especially since women are measured by the men they attract & it makes them feel good about themselves. Plus women are made to feel inferior if they don’t have a boyfriend so it’s handy to have a spare around.
Than I’d be happy to agree that those women friends were behaving like jerks. Because women are people, too, and can do that.
But NewJim’s wholesale “women like to keep poor men hanging around with vague promises of sex that never materialise” vibe. Bullshit.
To a certain extent, some of this reminds me of those gay men who obsess over straight men they know. This is generally perceived by most gay men as massively dysfunctional, and by most straight men (AFAIK) as creepy disturbing. The difference is chiefly that, in that situation, the obsessing gay man does not consider the straight man’s disinterest as a character flaw.
Also, there have been entirely too many movies in which a man desires a woman, she is initially uninterested, but after many complicated events she changes her mind and realizes he is The One. This is as realistic as the car commercials showing a man driving the car very fast on a winding road through beautiful countryside with no other cars in sight. I believe some road rage is caused by the cumulative effect of such commercials, and the movies have the same effect. “I helped you move! I’m always here for you! I’m a nice guy! Dammit, the entertainment industry says you’re supposed to love me by now!”
I like tree huggers story…to answer to blues question…the benifits of early traditional courtship are cost saving…there was a recent story. I think it was cbs or nbc that ran it and it talked about a woman who racked up thousands of dollars of dinners on someone else’s dime. She showed them her spread sheet where she basically charted breakfast lunch and dinner and kept all the names straight. She met over 100 men and she had no problem doing this with no intention of having even a relationship let alone sex. Of course this is an extreme case, but it does show at least one value of traditional courtship. Also, on the men’s side they were dumb enough to fall for it. Apperently this sort of behavior is common among women…can you blame them? Most people would take advantage of a willing victim. Tree hugger is a good person because she recognizes her part…but the guy is also to blame. He kept pushing something he obviously didn’t really feel either and the hurt is really on him.
@contrapangloss – If your friend has not *himself* told you how he feels, there’s no way for you to know how he feels. Or if your roommates have not directly *found out* how he feels, they are also just guessing, and do not know. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re not. But it’s not your job to magically discern whether or not your friend is into you as more than just a friend.
My M.O. is to assume that any relationship is “just friends” until there has been an actual conversation to change that (and provided nobody is trying to do things that “just friends” don’t do–handholding, kissing, etc.–at which point, that conversation needs to happen, pronto). If you’re really bothered about what your friend might be feeling, you *can*, of course, talk to him about it. That’s apt to be pretty darn awkward, but it may be preferable to stewing about it.
But if he hasn’t brought it up, and you haven’t seen any obvious hints, then maybe you can keep assuming that you are honestly, truly just friends. If he’s into you, it’s his job to get that into the open. If you’re not into him, you are not under any obligation to squelch his interest before he’s even mentioned it.
@contrapangloss
It’s not ‘friend zoning.’
It’s Schrödinger’s crush. Your observant friends might or might not be right. However, ____ has not chosen to express their feelings, and so if the friendship is reciprocal and fun, then it’s best to respect that and just let it be. You can’t react one way or the other to fix the situation because you don’t know which is true. If you continue to treat someone who acts like a friend as a friend, then you’re operating in good faith, not relegating them to some weird zone of hurt.
contrapangloss,
Seconding what everyone’s said. If _____ has feelings for you, he needs, as Captain Awkward would say, to use his words. If he’s a close friend, I’m guessing he knows you well enough to know you’re not going to read signals, so it’s even more on him to speak up. If he knows that, has feelings and does’t speak up, well, he’s either really shy or has fallen into the dumbest of NiceGuyTM behaviour. He doesn’t sound like that sort, given he’s your friend. I’d stick with thinking of him being a friend and maybe suggesting your friends stop speculating, since it’s making you uncomfortable.
I am curious to know what this prank was.
My first hand anecdotal evidence based on every woman I know says your apparently 2nd hand knowledge of women says that you’re talking out your arse. Again.
Do you realise how dumb you sound when you lecture a bunch of women about what women are like? Do you actually know any women in real life? Or are you so used to only talking to other men that you can’t turn off the “women are an alien species” vibe?
Also, just because you like ellipsis is irrelevant. That doesn’t turn them into paragraph breaks. Your writing is still hard to read. If your goal is to communicate rather than mansplain, I suggest you make the effort to use paragraphs.
*apologies for the use of dumb. I should have said ridiculous.
@contrapangloss, in my (limited) experience, when person X has a crush on person Y, often the last person to notice the telltale signs is person Y. In other words, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are bad at “reading” other people.
In the unlikely event that Jim has female friends, their awfulness can mostly be explained by the fact that they’d have to be fairly awful in order to want to be friends with Jim. As far as Simon’s blathering is concerned, nope, not reading any teal deers from someone too lazy/incompetent to use paragraph breaks.
@ contrapangloss
If (friend) is interested in you, and your inability to pick up on subtle cues is a known thing among your circle of friends, then it’s really the responsibility of (friend) to be direct if he wants you to know that he’s interested and/or actually wants something to happen. Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you have a responsibility to read his mind and ease any difficulty he may be having with declaring his feelings for him.
Also, this may be a case of the tendency of people to want to matchmake going on. People seem to love trying to pair up single friends, and can sometimes read stuff into situations that isn’t there. If (friend) was going around actually confessing his unrequited love to everyone in your circle that would be a different situation, but if they just kind of think he may be interested? Meh, no need to take any action at all at this point, imo.
Simon. Ellipses are neither full stops nor paragraph breaks. You want anyone to read your comments, format them properly. It’s 1) basic grammar and 2) basic courtesy to make your stuff readable. Gods know reading on screen is already hard enough on the eyes without being presented with a wall o’ text.
Sort of OT, all the talk about friendzones (ugh) and not knowing if someone is interested in you or could return your feelings makes me smile a bit, looking back over the decades before Mr K and I were in contact. It was almost rom-com stuff in a way, except instead of the “they’re in love but too shy to speak” trope, we couldn’t make contact. I spent decades not wanting to be a creepy stalkery type, because I couldn’t assume he’d return my feelings even if he knew I existed. It’s nice to be wrong sometimes!
Totally OT I was anti-friendzoned by Mads this morning. She wanted CUDDLES, and that’s not usually her thing at all. Leaving trails of fur all over my black leggings, yes; head-butting, yes; but wanting a Great Big Cuddle and head-butting and kneading dough all at the same time – can’t remember her doing that before.
Nice start to the day. 🙂
Also, this may be a case of the tendency of people to want to matchmake going on. People seem to love trying to pair up single friends, and can sometimes read stuff into situations that isn’t there.
Oh fuck yeah. Really nice bloke I worked with decades back, I liked his company a lot and yeah, he was nice looking (until he shaved his head and grew a beard, oh dear) … and all our freaking workmates turned into aunties trying to pair us off. That was SO offputting.
Wouldn’t have got anywhere even if I hadn’t been in love with Mr K; workmate was gay.
Whoops! Forgot to blockquote first para.