We’ve been getting comments from men asking for advice on avoiding the “friend zone”, and I’ve got good news for them. You’re not doing anything wrong. There’s no such thing as the “friend zone”. At least, not in the sense that men seem to dread it, as a big black hole waiting to swallow up their prospects of getting a woman naked if they step too close the edge.
There are, of course, men who we think of as friends and friends only, and will never see as anything else. But if that’s who you are to us, that’s just who you are to us. You couldn’t have avoided it by being more of a jerk or less available or not talking about your ex-girlfriend or getting something pierced or letting us know how you felt sooner.
If you’re in the “friend zone”, it’s not because we were once interested in you or would possibly have been interested in you but then you made the mistake of becoming our friend. If you’re stuck there, you were always going to be stuck there and you just have to decide whether you want to be friends or want to move along. There’s no sense agonizing over what you could have done differently. More importantly, there’s no sense agonizing over how you can avoid it the next time you meet a woman you’re interested in. It is what it is.
Men, in dating profiles, seem frequently to suggest that some sort of drive-by is best for the first meeting, because there’s no sense wasting time if there’s no “chemistry”. Yet you seem to assume that that’s a one-way street–that you can tell instantly whether or not you have “chemistry” with us, whether or not you’re “attracted”, yet we’re just waiting around for you to establish the ground rules and portray yourself as either a friend or a romantic prospect.
Nonsense. If we’re not into you, we’re not into you. Stop deluding yourself into believing that you have so much power.
Photo courtesy of Tina Phillips via freedigitalphotos.net
Hey Tiffany,
I loved this post. Imagine how many guys would have benefitted reading this before we got to be friends. So many of the fellows I have known have fallen right into this slot. There would have been a lot of time saved.
Theresa
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[...] and am always vigilant for inadvertant concessions. Some time ago, I wrote that there was no such thing as the “friend zone“. By that I meant that all of the efforts men putting into “avoiding the friend [...]