So I went out with some good male friends of mine this evening. As often eventually happens in a diverse group of friends, we discussed subjects designed to ascertain the views and motives of the opposite sex. Like all such nights, after a few beers, the conversation turns playfully antagonistic as we discuss what has become known to the experts as "the friendzone". If you're somehow not familiar, the friendzone, or the just-friends-zone, is the sexless and frigid outersphere of the dating world where your beloved sends you when she decides she's never going to be in to you and there isn't anything you can do about it. In previous conversations, for reasons I couldn't quite explain, the friendzone had irked me. Why?
The answer I arrived at, after much deliberation, is one that I'm sure many people have arrived at before me, and I don't say it with venom or with the paranoid malice of a rabid feminist. I don't say it because I don't understand or empathize with the pain of loving someone who doesn't love you. I say it because it's true.
The friendzone is just inherently sexist.
Typically, when women discover that the men they secretly drool for don't reciprocate, we internalize. I'm not the type of person he's looking for. Perhaps he isn't the type of person that could be good for me either. Holy shit, this was embarrassing. Time to seek greener pastures.
But over and over, I see my guy friends rush to the aid of their friendzoner, helping her move, fixing her car, listening to garbage about other boyfriends, and I'm not saying she bears no responsibility for being either callous toward his obvious feelings or determinedly oblivious to them, but I am saying the suffering is the responsibility of the sufferer in this case.Why, I would ask, does he never break his lease in the friendzone and stick his thumb in the breeze? Why, oh why, does he leap at opportunities to be chivalrous? Why does he sit glassy-eyed while she describes her day in detail in order to seem a good listener? Why would he be doing this to himself over and over? Why does conversation about her always turn, well, a little ugly when he finally does decide to move on?
The truth, as far as I can tell from the outside, is that you men... you love the friendzone a little. The friendzone would not exist if you didn't secretly want to be a resident of it. Just a little. Because even when they're the purveyors of their own misery, men have described the situation the way a war veteran describes combat, the way a man soon to be martyred declares his beliefs, all with this determined, unabashed, and infuriating insistence that you have fought the good and blameless fight. That it's her that doesn't recognize what she has. Doesn't she know how happy you could make her? Doesn't she realize that you're made for each other and you'll never love again? The arc bends towards justice, damn it, and if I hold out long enough, this will happen.
Dude, seriously. She has thought of all of this and arrived at the same conclusion time and again: no.
But this train of thought does not seem to be limited to crushes and fantasies. An argument that was brought up tonight at the bar was that men seem to have different ideas about what they should be getting (not always, I know, but statistically more than women), which is why you hear of more guys befalling the perils of the friendzone than women. And here's where we get into the really seedy side of the friendzone. This is my subjective, totally-based-on-personal-experience-but-I-think-still-accurate theory: women, I think, are motivated by the things they think they want. Men are motivated by the things they think they deserve. You see this in careers, in personal belongings, family life... and relationships.
The cold hard truth, friends, is that I don't care how nice of a guy you are. You are not entitled to affection, sex, or reciprocated feelings. You are not entitled to be the one man out of billions that a girl chooses simply because the list of things you've done for her is longer than some other guy's. One might even say you don't have the logical right to be offended when she chooses that guy over you. You are entitled to respect and human dignity from any and all types of friends, but only to the extent that you give it. No amount of boyishly charming dogoodership is going to earn yourself somebody falling in love with you.
Or anything really, because it isn't hard to see how this insistence on what a man is owed translates into more sinister scenarios.
I bought you a drink. You made out with me. Look at what you're wearing. You already said you would.
When you consider that 85% of rapes on college campuses are committed by someone the victim knew, the picture becomes something completely different. Is it likely that 85% of college-aged rapists just like to get chummy with their victims first, or is it possible that the majority of those men, whether drunk, sober, emotional, or violent, simply disagreed with their victim, formerly their friend, about what was owed?
The real problem with the friend zone is that it's a subtler and quieter version of the mentality that says women must do what they're asked to do. Women are in the wrong if they disagree about what a particular relationship is or isn't. They're either mistaken or just malicious. I have no responsibility to accept her wishes, the friendzone says, or take responsibility for my own happiness and move on. I have every right to inflict guilt, blame or worse on the object of my affections, because she is what I deserve.
My guy friends are not rapists. Of course not. They're good people and good boyfriends when they are ones. But this mindset is a tricksey little impersonator of genuine affection, of a steady wish for the loved one's ultimate good. It is self-serving instead of selfless, and is damaging even when in its quieter and cuddlier form. Entitlement never lets the person in its sway suspect that he might be the victim of unrealistic expectations, because there will always be an external target to blame. In its purest state, at its furthest and most straight-forward intention... it's dangerous.
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