Oh no, my miserable life that’s devoid of any connection and anyone altogether otherwise *at least contains a friend.
What the fuck man, is this a real concern average people have that I’m way too fucking alienated to understand
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And yet pretty much everyone I became platonic with I develop a crush on / slightly fall for if they remain cool.
As I said, the “friend zone” as a concept is generally a cognitohazard. Having romantic interest turned down hurts, yes, but anticipating “friendzoning” and seeing it as some antagonistic experience that must result in a complete cutting off of the other person just raises the antagonism in the dating pool that much more.
It fucking sucks that so few cishet men are willing to try an actual nonromantic friendship with a cishet woman and I think normalizing the idea of “if no sex, then disappear” just makes that worse.
Growing up gay, I would have done anything if it meant the maximum consequence for confessing my feelings to someone who wasn’t interested was a “no”. Usually the best I could expect was a reaction so out the fucking wazoo, it’s as if I had shot their grandma to death in front of them. Worst case would be my brain becoming a plaything for a med student by next morning.
I’ve got a feeling that if I’d reacted the same way to a straight lady asking me out, society would suddenly become enlightened as to the proper way to behave.
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but I don’t think forcing people’s emotions to conform to what you want is an effective or stable way to fight misogyny
Neither is normalizing the idea of resenting the other person’s emotions that doesn’t mutually share in those emotions.
I have trouble telling between my crushes and squishes sometimes, so I just choose to label the feelings based on whether the two of us feel like getting naughty. If we’re not doing naughty stuff together then it’s a squish, and I choose to be happy to be spending platonic time with them
Dang I’m getting old wtf is a squish
It’s a persistent feeling of platonic attraction towards a person. The platonic equivalent of a crush.
Haven’t you ever had a friend that you were excited and happy to spend time with in the initial stages of the relationship? One who gave you butterflies in your stomach, but who you didn’t want to date?
Platonic crush
?
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platonic
People say this, but let’s be honest the “friend zone” is something most people experience, it just go cringe to use because of the way incels use it. Having romantic feelings for someone while trying to have a plutonic relationship with them is a frustrating thing to navigate. The issue is people getting an immature victimhood complex about it.
Yeah the whole incel thing has really poisoned the well on a legitimate issue like this. It’s kind of funny how some leftists will talk about context when it comes to the faults of former AES states but on other issues (especially ones like this, i.e. dating) they completely ignore context and sound like your average lib. Oh well I guess we all have to continue to grow.
Also if it something you can’t handle, better off just avoiding the person and trying to move on. Hoping plutonic friendship leads to romantic love is usually a fools errand.
I mean it works out for some people I suppose (for ex UlyssessT in this thread) but yeah I think remaining friends while still holding out hope is disingenuous.
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I mean, I don’t think it’s a “legitimate issue” in the sense that it’s something society needs to deal it, it’s an interpersonal thing that sucks but that individuals need to deal with in the best way they can.
I think it’s both. Just like any other issue that socialists talk about, like racism, sexism, classism, etc. They can all be “dealt with” on an interpersonal level, but ultimately there needs to be a societal change.
Just like any other issue that socialists talk about, like racism, sexism, classism, etc. They can all be “dealt with” on an interpersonal level, but ultimately there needs to be a societal change.
what societal change do you think needs to occur about this issue?
Probably making it so boys and men have emotional support other than their partner or therapist and generally teaching them not to treat relationships as status signifiers or commodities. Unfortunately, that probably has to start young and we already have a bunch of shitty men floating around
relationships as status signifiers
ugh well put & good post.
One of the examples I remember is from r4r or one of the nerd dating spheres where someone wanted a partner who was smart, but not as smart as them. Obviously, they wanted her to smart enough to impress their friends (the ones who they constantly jockey for clout about intelligence with), but didn’t really want to respect her or feel intellectually threatened. Which also says a lot about what they think of their friends, let alone their prospective partner they were looking for.
teaching them not to treat relationships as status signifiers or commodities.
Well the problem is that relationships aren’t status signifiers. They are status, in the most concrete way possible.
Edit: Like it’s an old truism, that certain kinds of guys will deliberately pursue making money more than actually trying to build their social skills directly because it can open more doors for you socially & “romantically”.
Edit 2: What I’m getting at here is that “status” is an inherently social concept. It has to do with the people who you interact with on a day-to-day basis, & what you can expect from your interactions with them. In this sense, yes, somebody who doesn’t have a lot of friends or any romantic partners, is objectively socially inferior to somebody who does. They are, by definition, valued less by the the people around them & are less socially integrated, as a consequence of that. And that itself will usually be the consequence of the person in question possessing some quality that is considered inferior by the society they live in.
The whole issue I think is something that just isn’t really well addressed by any contemporary discussion on the matter, I think.
what societal change do you think needs to occur about this issue?
Maybe reverse the trend of turning dating into a commodified market for one. Apps like Tinder have really made looks be the sole factor in whether you even want to talk to someone. It’s become so gamified that we essentially treat potential partners as some kind of stock investment. Also the digital world has really isolated us and we rarely even talk to people anymore except through text or instagram. I think electronic communication is great (I mean here I am commenting on hexbear) but not at the expense of real life contact (hence the “touch grass” meme). Maybe have community centers that actually appeal to people? I dunno, perhaps we need to look at what the Soviets and other cultures do to help people meet each other (https://youtu.be/teZw4-trPuE?feature=shared).
I actually agree with most of the above while at the same time I see the “being friends with someone that is otherwise not romantically interested is bad/impossible” take as being the equivalent of throwing dirt into the rejection wound. Maybe a friendship is impossible for an individual but systemically assuming it is only makes the dating scene a little bit worse by making it more antagonistic.
what societal change do you think needs to occur about this issue?
IMO, I think it’s worthwhile for society to take an active interest in helping integrate kids & young people who are lagging behind socially. There are programs that claim to try to do this today, but I didn’t really ever get any help, I just got told what to do & that I’d go in a windowless box if I didn’t do that.
If you get to be 30 & you’re still in that position, like I am idk how much there is that can be done, because a lot of the contributing factors to the issue have become ossified/terminal.
Socialization is very much a “rich get richer, poor get poorer” (if you’ll excuse the analogy) situation, in my experience.
I think remaining friends while still holding out hope
I agree here specifically because the “holding out hope” part is, both for the friendship and for the person maintaining that hope instead of accepting the friendship, or moving on without the friendship if they can’t, which is also preferable to “holding out hope.”
Accept the friendship if you can, earnestly work toward accepting the friendship if you’re not all the way there, or move on. Those are the best choices.
Hoping plutonic friendship leads to romantic love is usually a fools errand.
I agree with everything you said, except this one here, every functioning long term relationship (and i mean decades long term) i saw in my life was evolved from this. Platonic friends are better at solving their problems in general, way better than people who came together cause they wanted to fuck each other.
While I have indeed been 'friend zone’d, I’ve had more than three platonic friendships turn into romantic relationships in my lifetime, which is the majority of my actual relationships. Obviously don’t rely on it, maybe the key was that I went into all those friendships fully accepting that we might only ever be friends and that was fine.
It depends how long the platonic relationship has been. If it only been a few weeks or even months if you don’t see each other often, moving over to a romantic relationship can go really well. If you’re trying to turn a years long platonic relationship into a romantic one, yeah in most cases that I’d a fools errand.
[Medium: Failure] — “The friend-zone” is the single worst place any wöman could dare to put you in. It’s where you’re sent when — for some unknown, female reason — she doesn’t value you as a potential mate. That she values someone with better mate qualities than you. That’s what the friend-zone is; it’s wöman’s way of saying “fuck you”.
— It’s really that bad? — Of course, bröther. The gynocentrists want you to think it’s fine. Break your conditioning. Keep pushing. Your persistence will prove how much you deserve her.I love Disco internal dialogue posting.
Art Moderne
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On the converse, I tried to take a relationship with a close friend to the next level.
It did not go well and we do not talk anymore
red_stapler
corgiwithalaptoplosing a friend trying to break the volcel oath
Yeah see, even if I was deeply interested in a romantic relationship with that person, I’d never take it to the next level and stay within boundaries out of fear of not losing them.
Is that conceited?
Nah, it just seems like a defense mechanism I guess. As @[email protected], we learned our lessons.
Wish I had thought like you did at the time. Oh well. Maybe in another life.
Were you initially attracted romantically from the beginning?
I was, they knew it.
Did you secretly like them or did you admit it? And did they secretly know or only know after you admitted it?
I don’t know if they knew before I told them, but I did explicitly tell them.
Bit idea.
- Find people who think “the friend zone” is incel-speak for “when femoids won’t fuck me”.
- Find people who think “the friend zone” is just an emotionally ambiguous attraction.
- Put them in a thread and let them fight.
It would be so funny
Ambiguity over definitions is the lifeblood of struggle sessions
emotionally ambiguous attraction
It’s kind of unfair to assume the person who said they aren’t romantically interested is being “ambiguously attracted.”
The people arguing from that perspective aren’t talking about relationships where someone’s been rejected or even necessarily would be rejected if they tried. That’s kind of my point. People are talking about very disparate things and calling them the same name.
Then that’s also ambiguous and doesn’t really do the concept/meme of “friendzone” as a bad thing many favors.
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Giving this a bump because the extremes have widened.
It is now “the OP is mocking anyone who’s ever experienced unrequited love” vs “anyone complaining about this post feels entitled to women’s bodies”.
Post machine go brrrrr
Did some one say… extreme?
I consider myself a radical centrist on the wacky axis
I don’t buy the misogyny arguments here. I remember being a teenager, and that shit feels desperate. Everybody else is hooked up and they seem so happy, and you’ve found someone you feel like you can really connect with, but they don’t feel the same. So you’ve made a big deal of it in your mind and when they say “I think of you more as a friend”, it feels like a full-on breakup.
Of course, you still have to get over it, just like a breakup. Learning to deal with that stuff is part of growing up.
Even as an adult, couples tend to hang out with other couples, and it can be challenging to be the single person in a group.
I know some people go too far, wallowing in self-pity over being friendzoned, and it can poison a person. Maybe it seems silly from the outside, and you think they should just get over it, but I think people deserve empathy and support as much as possible. Ideally we can help people work through their shit and not let this little blip in their lives come to define them.
Okay I’m done rambling. Thanks for reading.
What part of “you’ve found someone you feel like you can really connect with” excludes being friends or queerplatonic partners with that person? Ideally all your friendships should have a deep feeling of personal connection and love.
While I agree principally, I think a good percentage of people in the world reserve that kind of intimacy for their romantic partner, or select one or two long-term friends already in their life. So if they’re unwilling to have a romance, I think the odds are very small that a deep personal connection will then bloom.
So then we’re back at the issue that people hate being friendzoned because they refuse to value friendships
I think people hate being friendzoned because others’ ideas of ‘friendships’ likely doesn’t match include the level of personal connection they want. It would be cool if everyone was willing and able to have deep personal connections with their friends, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect it. I don’t think reserving deep intimacy for a specific few people is the same as ‘refusing to value friendships’.
It’s a fair way to live one’s life, but it will mean it’s not unreasonable for other people to be disappointed when told they can’t establish in that deeper connection.
I think you summed up my thoughts on this better than I could ever articulate. It’s like it’s become a thing now to take any negative feelings about romantic or sexual rejection and ascribe to it the label “incel” just because some / many people deal with that rejection in unhealthy ways.
I found myself in the friend zone lots of times in my single days. It sucks and it hurt. But I didn’t go online and whinge about it or say all women are bad or whatever or let it mutate into anti-social behaviors. I maybe felt down for a bit and then moved on, nbd. That’s how I bet most people deal with it.
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Maybe it seems silly from the outside, and you think they should just get over it, but I think people deserve empathy and support as much as possible. Ideally we can help people work through their shit and not let this little blip in their lives come to define them.
Yeah it definitely is a shitty feeling, and those that try to convince you it’s not are honestly trying to gaslight you (whether intentionally or not).
I mean, having romantic feelings for someone who doesn’t feel the same is a bummer. Like, you should get over it because obsessing over that is teenager shit. But it’s still a bummer.
I grow to dislike the concept. Notice how it focuses only on the one who wants to pursue a sexual/romantic relationship, as if platonic relationship is somehow lesser. Why don’t we ever hear about the “sexual zone” or “romantic zone” about people who desire a deep platonic relationship with someone but who are placed in the “sexual/romantic zone” by that someone? It hurts to be previously friends with someone who gives you the cold shoulder once they find out you don’t want to fuck them. Why should the sexual zoned person’s feelings perspective and feelings be cast aside for the friend zoned person’s feelings and perspective?
It hurts to be previously friends with someone who gives you the cold shoulder once they find out you don’t want to fuck them.
I guess in that case there was never really a friendship to begin with.
There was one parody Tumblr post about being put in the “girlfriend zone”.
Why don’t we ever hear about the “sexual zone” or “romantic zone” about people who desire a deep platonic relationship with someone but who are placed in the “sexual/romantic zone” by that someone?
I think the kids are calling this a “situationship” these days.
A “situationship” is an ambiguous dating relationship where one person maybe wants to get serious and the other doesn’t want to talk about it. Risk factors include “short-term open to long” in tinder bio
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Socialism is when you take an archetypical trope, (unrequited love), common to every time and culture, and dismiss it w/ performative, incredibly hamfisted, body-and-spaces discourse (whiteness, toxic masculinity).
the idea of the friend zone is definitely not just good old unrequited love. the unspoken implication is that women only like “bad guys” and thus you should never be nice to women, lest you end up in the friend zone
Socialism is when you ignore the fact that tropes can play out in many different ways and that particular manifestations of it can in fact reflect broader social issues
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This feels contrarian for the sake of it. Being in a limbo with someone you have feelings for is understandably uncomfortable for anyone. I honestly think dunking on someone for this just kind of shows emotional immaturity
I view it more as dunking on the particular type of dweeb that starts an obnoxious screed about how women only want to date assholes and that they don’t ever look at the nice guys in their lives and wonder why their lives suck.
definitely think if you care and talk about the ‘friendzone’ as a concept it raises red flags about how one approaches romance, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with someone feeling unhappy that their romantic feelings were unreciprocated. like with most things when it comes to this subject i think the issue is thinking critically about why you feel a certain way - for a lot of people the sting of rejection comes from feeling entitled to romance which is clearly problematic.
I do have a friend who does only date assholes, it’s very sad and she says so. They have done things like break her arm, break into her house after they’d broken up and steal all of her knives etc. It’s actually a repeated pattern in her relationships that strikes me as pathological.
That said, the incel/“nice guy” vibe is defining asshole as “someone who is more confident than me”.
I do have a friend who does only date assholes, it’s very sad and she says so. They have done things like break her arm, break into her house after they’d broken up and steal all of her knives etc. It’s actually a repeated pattern in her relationships that strikes me as pathological.
Yeah that’s the thing, you don’t have to give into the incel mindset to notice this kind pattern.
That said, the incel/“nice guy” vibe is defining asshole as “someone who is more confident than me”.
Yeah, although I do think that the “asshole” and the “nice guy” are two sides of the same coin (both toxic but in different ways; one more overt and the other covert). Actual confident/good guys often get mistaken as “assholes” simply cuz they have the confidence, like you said.
I honestly think dunking on someone for this just kind of shows emotional immaturity
A few weeks ago I met a system and was thinking about the possibility of a relationship with them, but they said they were taken so I was friendzoned. A few days ago they said they were willing to try polyamory again and want to date me and join my swarm, but one of their members has some creepy incel behaviours and I want to deprogram the alt right shit in his head before I get too close to him, so I friendzoned them.
Being friendzoned didn’t suck and friendzoning them didn’t suck. We’re simply not in a place where a relationship would be healthy right now, even though we’ve quickly become close friends. It doesn’t suck because I know how to communicate and set clear boundaries from both sides.
I think this “wah I’m in the friendzone” shit comes from straight men who never learned how to be honest with their feelings and others. Honestly, that kind of behaviour is why I’m not dating my friend. If these men spent more time learning about feelings, maybe they wouldn’t be friendzoned in the first place.
EDIT: oh and obviously being monoamorous is a big source of angst for straight people, but that’s their own fault too.
A few weeks ago I met a system and was thinking about the possibility of a relationship with them, but they said they were taken so I was friendzoned. A few days ago they said they were willing to try polyamory again and want to date me and join my swarm, but one of their members has some creepy incel behaviours and I want to deprogram the alt right shit in his head before I get too close to him, so I friendzoned them.
This is entirely illegible to me, lmao.
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Well, it was only the very beginnings of a crush. I got to the answer quickly because I’m efficient.
It’s because they hate women and see them only as something to boost their social status. Like a house or car.
If they are friends with a woman with no prospect of fucking, in their minds that makes them of lesser status.
It’s all misogynist pop psychology bullshit.
Yeah, agreed about the misogyny.
Also, as I think about it, what if it partially stems from people politely rejecting others, after a date, by telling them they just want to be friends when they don’t actually mean it?
I’ve had that shit happen to before and it kind of blows. Went on a date with a cool, attractive girl in a new city where I didn’t know anyone, and she let me know afterwards that she thinks I’m cool but just wants to be friends. I was like ‘fuck yeah, I don’t give a shit’ but we never spoke after that :( Don’t say it if you don’t mean it, but then again maybe I should have put in more effort into staying in contact with her.
What if it partially stems from people politely rejecting others, after a date, by telling them they just want to be friends when they don’t actually mean it?
Unfortunately, that can happen, but keep in mind that rejecting men is often very dangerous for women and they have to be very careful not to seem unfriendly. It’s probably not personal or intentionally cruel, but rather an automatic defense mechanism.
Unfortunately, that can happen, but keep in mind that rejecting men is often very dangerous for women and they have to be very careful not to seem unfriendly.
That’s a factor that people in this thread that are going “won’t someone think of the friendzoned men and their unique and unfathomable pain” either don’t see or refuse to see.
extreme horniness + emotional immaturity + unaddressed misogyny + a feeling of entitlement to sex + romantic rejection = upset about being “friendzoned”it happens to a lot of folks, and no doubt it hurts like hell, but once they see the ingredients, they realize the problem and they can choose to grow… or get worse.
Damn if all the romantic poets, pining away for unrequited love, simply realized they were only misogynists. Lol.
Quite a few entertainers and musicians in history were arguably misogynistic under a closer analysis and their fame doesn’t really excuse or justify that. “Lol.”
If the romantic poets were complaining bitterly about how they’ve been wronged by women because they don’t want to date them then yeah maybe they were
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A lot of them definitely were lol
For me the way I see it as a guy, being friends with someone, while secretly or not so secretly holding out for something more romantically and/or sexually, is just disingenuous. It also comes across as really needy, desperate behaviour. Which, in my personal experience, is the biggest turn off for women. So you’re not going to change their mind this way. The true motivations behind the “friendship” are extremely transparent and plain for everyone else to see. People can tell what’s going on, you know what you’re doing, the woman knows, all your mutual friends know on some level. There’s a reason “orbiters” get made fun of constantly for orbiting a specific woman.
If you still want to be friends with the person you have a crush on after being rejected or realising that it can’t happen for whatever reason, you’re going to have to fully accept that they don’t see you in that way. Then the friendship is longer based off of the idea that you can have a relationship. Failure to accept that will doom any future friendship for the reasons I’ve listed above. If you cant accept that, it’s probably better to have less contact with the person or even stop seeing them, instead of going though the motions in some “friendship” which is built off of the idea/fantasy that you’ll eventually date them.
Yea, this is 100% it. If you can’t kill your romantic feelings for them friendship is just not going to work. You’ll just be hurting the whole time you’re with them, especially if they get involved with someone else and like you said it can definitely stray into creepy behavior. It’s a shitty situation for both parties and of course it’d be great if we could just switch those feelings off but that’s not always an easy thing to do.
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I mean, if I’m romantically interested in someone and they say that they’re not romantically interested in me, that sucks.
Emotions are not rational. I can cognitively know “I am not entitled to this person’s romantic interest and having them in my life as a friend is just as valuable as being in a romantic relationship with them” but my emotions will still feel disappointed and saddened because my romantic feelings aren’t being reciprocated. Confessing your feelings to someone is also a huge moment of emotional vulnerability, and being rejected in that situation can make one feel powerless and inadequate.
Are you gonna tell me that if you confess your feelings to someone and they give you the whole “Let’s just be friends” response, your reaction is “Oh yay, I made a friend”?
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It’s kind of alien to me too, the idea of being someone’s friend being taken as a social rejection (which more often than not means no longer talking to that person) because no le sexy sex will occur.
Yes, it’s disappointing when someone doesn’t reciprocate romantic/sexual attraction. For me the alien part is “therefore cut that person entirely out.” If it wasn’t intended to be a hook-up all along, it makes the entire social bond seem sus in hindsight to me.
In my experience, actually accepting a non-romantic friendship often results in additional friendships with that friend’s friends if that friend actually likes you non-romantically, and sometimes those can bloom into romance anyway, often at the first friend’s encouragement/recommendation. Don’t do it for that reason (transactional thinking is a fuck) but my point is that fatalistically seeing “the friend zone” as some evil bad thing is self-fulfilling prophecy.
I will say, a lot of men’s “friendships” are, uh, surface level and very emotionally unfulfilling.
Fuck, isn’t that the truth. I fell in love the first time largely because she would/could actually talk with me about feelings and fears and I felt seen as a person for the first time.
no more half measures walter
you always dropping the wisdom round these parts
