The Friend Zone
Why we hate it so
Women could not, I think, handle being men. Oh, the other way round is a given – men would never stop bleating on about it if they bled out of their penis for a week each month. Yet there are particular aspects of being a man women would really struggle with; I don’t think many women would, finding themselves in the male position, easily be able to enjoy the entire ‘Does she love me? She loves me not’ business after finding that, No, she very much does not love you, she never thinks about you, and you now need to go and ask fifteen other people out with no prospect of any more success. Many women would, I contend, be shocked at the sheer amount of rejection involved in trying to attract women as a man and the constant destruction of your ego it entails along with a constant demand to ‘Be confident!’ as another £50 gurgles down the dating plughole.
Men, then, have to put themselves out there, and I’ve had situations where I’ve put as much effort into wooing a woman as I have for say, writing a month’s worth of these newsletters, only to arrive at – often hot on the heels of a definitive note of rejection – that upbeat parting offer, ‘I’d still like to stay friends tho.’
Why is this quite so annoying?
First of all, the key word here is ‘stay’. If you’ve been in a relationship where romantic pursuit has been very much the name of the game, and has been tacitly or explicitly encouraged by both parties, nobody is ‘staying’ friends; the request is instead to radically alter your relationship dynamics to become friends. Suffice to say, the disappointment of sexual hopes, which a man or woman has often taken quite some risks to their ego to pursue, is not the natural springboard for an immediate switch to a platonic set-up. In most cases, you’re now pretty gutted, and even if you did want to reconfigure that flirtation to friendship, you’d need a break and, potentially, another partner first.
Women often speak of the pressure they feel to be agreeable, and perhaps behind the offer of friendship instead of sex is a desire to take the hurt out of situations. It’s understandable, particularly with rejected men, who can in moments of aggrieved pride even become violent or dangerous to women. Of course, this raises the possibility that offering the friend zone is just a way to defuse an awkward situation, in the full awareness that it will be refused, but for the purposes of this article I’m treating its offering as sincere.
In my view, an attitude of gentle let-downs can make it worse when a situation is intrinsically hurtful. It just sucks to be rejected romantically, particularly by someone you really like, and if you have been knocked back you need to commune with yourself, play your sad records and get yourself ready to get back out there again. Almost always, there’s a better partner waiting for you after rejection; being together with someone should never be down to the will of one individual alone. Yet it’s not going to aid that process to be hanging round, mooningly infatuated with the person who has decided against you.
From the person who rejects you and wants to keep you as a friend, there can be a slight capriciousness too. Oh, they’re in one sense trying to protect you, but there’s also perhaps an aspect of ‘I’ll keep you around in case I don’t find a better option later.’ After all, the rejected party might come in handy – you know they like you, so you can get bag carrying, walking home and general social protection from them, all the while knowing you’ve made it clear that you don’t want them as that kind of mate. Unless, of course, the rejecter is secretly keeping their options open up, and I do know at least one man who after years of unrequited love was retrieved from the Friend Zone, given a lick of paint, and brought into relationship serviceability.
I should point out I’m guilty of having put others in this position myself. I had an affair with a woman in Berlin, who became very infatuated with me to a degree I found uncomfortable, and whom I told at the end ‘I’d like us to be friends tho.’ She responded with, ‘That’s pathetic. We were never friends.’
She was right; you can’t offer a situation as a consolation prize which was the exact opposite of what the other person was seeking. Being friends is even more squarely not what they wanted than having no contact at all.
I’m certainly not someone who doesn’t believe men and women can’t be friends; I’ve always had rich cross-sex friendships. And it is of course a very different thing if both people are genuinely content to switch to becoming friends, like a cricket team declaring they have enough runs on the board.
However, normally those friendships fulfill one of two categories; there was never any mutual attraction between them, just friendship, or there was a sexual attraction which was either exhausted or outgrown. What I’ve never had is a romantic pursuit which ended in rejection and then straightaway turned into a friendship which both parties were mutually happy about. To the extent that it has ever been possible, it was much, much later, when both people had moved on. And even in such cases, the unconsummated vibe remains in the air a little.
I am sure many women find this is a bit immature, a sign of how basic and disrespectful men are if they are not not prepared to maintain friendships with women once the possibility of sex is off the table. ‘So you're only interested in us for sex, then?’ In fact, the interest of the other person in you over a period of flirtation has been near total; it’s precisely their interest which as been deflated. That deflation is hard to just jump out of; when two people have embarked on an ambiguous tango of unconsummated eroticism, it's inevitably jarring to change the music and ask your partner to fling themselves with equal abandon into the Hokey Cokey. I am sure women find it hurtful to feel that a relationship was predicated only on its potential consumation; likewise, many men find it absolutely devastating to feel there is a sexual prospect and then come to a hard stop. There is an element too in being made to feel sexually harmless which can feel deeply humiliating, even put in terms like ‘You’re lovely, just not for me.’
Again, the fundamental misapprehension comes from women not understanding how limited most men’s sexual options are, and how hard they have to work to realize them. The friend zone, which is seen by some people as a way to preserve something positive from an abandoned flirtation, is a big drain on a man’s limited time to find and connect with a partner prepared to offer him sexual love. 'You’re just interested in for me for sex!’ implies that sex is a matter of secondary importance to men or indeed anybody else. Sex is literally the reason we are all here.
Fundamentally, women receiving loads of unattractive sexual offers from men have a different experience from the typical male situation of receiving very few offers from anybody at all, while working furiously on those they have, and I think different views of the desireability of the friend zone in part emerge from this different experience of sexual opportunities. Friend zoning is, then, a strange example of women lacking empathy with men rather than the other way round.
The sexes do lots of awful things to each other. Men don’t listen to women enough, relentlessly centre their own needs, and often have no real sense of the consistent physical jeopardy women moving through public spaces constantly feel. But this matter – following up crushing sexual rejection with a desire to ‘just be good friends’, is a bad thing women frequently do to men. And, if women were men, or were at least better engaging with the perspective of the men who desire them, they’d know how emasculating and provocative it can come over when made as as a unilateral decision. You are effectively telling someone how to feel.
Once you’ve rejected someone who’s put themselves out there enough to make the nature of their feelings plain to you, and if they’ve dealt with it with grace, you don’t get to determine the exact nature of your relationship going forward, or even if there is one. For most men, and perhaps just most people, a clean break in such circumstances is the best option, at least until time has done its usual magic on the wounds. We all should respect that No means no, and that sentiment extends to a rejected party’s right to decide against being ‘just good friends’, even if only for their own sake.