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Meanwhile I had the opposite problem. Lots of friends that happened to be girls. Then they find a partner, and the conversations, meetups and discussions fizzle away, especially if I stop initiating contact. I then learn years down the line “oh yeah I had such a huge crush on you” or “I’da fucked your brains out” or some other combination. And then general blaming for me not “making the move” like no shit, I treated you as a friend. If you wanted that, just say it openly please
So many opportunities are passed by on both sides because of this miscommunication.
Men hear women’s don’t want you to go in with the expectation of anything other than friendship, while also expecting men to know their subtle hints that they are interested so they can come off feeling more desirable.
Women on the other hand don’t trust most men because of what they see around us, their past interactions with men, and for the above stated. They don’t want to feel like just meat for the dogs.
If both sides would be more open instead of all of this beating around the bush, I feel like most people would go in with better expectations and maybe even better experiences. All because they were open and honest from the beginning.
Just my thoughts, as I’ve been in both positions before as a teen, and definitely regret not being more open with the people I was interacting with!
Unbridled proof that young single hetero-males and young single hetero-females cannot just be friends.
I am an 40 year old man and I have multiple lifelong female friends.
Sure, I bumped into the problem of a one sided romantic interest a few times in my life, but I have lifelong platonic female friends.
I also have lifelong female friends who I have slept with. The stars aligned to make it happen (like both of us going through a breakup) but we knew it wasn’t going to be anything else and we talked about it and never mentioned it again. That’s a rare, rare, rare thing though. It probably could have developed into more if we had wanted the same things, but we didn’t and we discussed it.
It is possible. I’m living proof.
Hell, I’ve shared beds with some of these lifelong female friends and nothing happened. We’re still friends today. I got lucky and landed a woman who trusts me and doesn’t question my intentions because she knows that I wouldn’t cheat on her for all of the gold on the planet.
One of my lifelong female friends is a bit odd though, and she always messages my wife to let her know she’s about to contact me before she does. We’ve both told her she doesn’t have to do that, but she’s a very pretty woman who is used to making jealous women suspicious.
I mean sure. It’s a bit more to navigate at times but it is doable.
That’s some grade school bullshit
No it ain’t broski
I’ve had plenty of platonic friendships. I lived with one girl for 4 years and we get along great. Our birthday is one day apart and even though we live 1000 miles apart we still celebrate our birthdays together every year. She’s married and I’ve made friends with her husband and I’m married and she’s friends with my wife. So yeah, it’s possible if you’re not a dumb neanderthal and see women as people.
You’re married and old. It isn’t the same. Maybe I should’ve phrased it better.
So when we met I was unmarried and young. But keep moving those goalposts buddy
What do you smoke?
Crack
Most of my friends are women and I’m a hetero male, guess were not friends then?
Yeah but you’re like 40+. It’s different for older folks
So?
You’re probably married and less spontaneous. I should’ve been more specific
Not married. And you being specific doesn’t help.
Let’s chock it up to your age then
I’m a cishet dude. I think sex is awesome. but I don’t understand the need to fuck everything that moves.
I get it, women can be very beautiful, sexy, cute, pretty, cool, whatever… there’s all kinds of nice. and I do appreciate that a lot. I do appreciate seeing a woman who’s any of those things. even none of those things. but I don’t get … like why do you feel the need to fuck every single person? friends are so fulfilling. the endless thirst is weird.
edit: please don’t come at me with evo psych shit. can’t believe people actually do this still. shitting is a biological drive too, but I don’t look at every surface as a toilet because I understand that it’s appropriate to shit at a toilet but not on a driveway. I think it’s possible to respect women as much as you can respect driveways to not see them as objects to your so-called biological drive.
also how come women don’t try fuck everything with a dick? you think it’s not biological for women? come on.
no the answer isn’t evolution or biology. it’s sociology. we need to educate and socialize our boys better.
Contrary to what most dudes here are preaching, I think this happens just because most dudes rarely have any deep personal connection with a woman and, once they do, they feel attracted to them.
That last bit is easy to answer. I mean, I agree with you 100%.
When you’re talking about the difference between the drive of men and women though there’s one really really huge difference.
A woman can have one child a year and for a limited window in her life. A man can have as many kids as they can get women. A woman needs to be selective about a mate whereas a man can push out as many children as possible and hopefully some of them will be able to carry on the dna.
That is if we’re looking at it from a purely biological standpoint and we don’t take our intelligence into account, and I don’t know how much time you’ve spent around the average motherfucker, but I worked in a gas station in a town with no bars so I was the only way a man could get alcohol. And oh boy, the average motherfucker ain’t right.
I tend to agree. People tend to discount the biological drive, and even of we aren’t animals about it the drive certainly will color decision making.
That leaves the social factors that keep the sexes from easily and widely just being friends (a mess that isn’t gonna be solved in this discussion) and how we use our brains to override biology…some plainly better about it than others.
the endless thirst is weird.
Except for a majority of guys, it is very, very real. Uncontrollable and overwhelming, at least until you hit your 40s, and for some guys, never, no matter what they do, and no matter how old they get.
Luckily stoicism, meditation, and psychological feedback loops have helped me a lot, but I’m currently in my sixth decade on this rock and I can still occasionally (once or twice a year) still feel this immense and un-ignorable pull to scope out a woman. My own ruminations have led me to suspect that “lust” exists as three internal forces, from an autonomic, almost instinctual need to do a double-take before you even grok her actual attractiveness, over actual hormonal/physical lust that has zero conscious control (or which extensively disrupts any attempt to control it), all the way up to infatuation that is and can be consciously directed, and can be almost immediately lost if conditions change or if proper mental discipline is employed.
And all three layers hitting you like a swirling vortex of chaos really throws you for a loop and utterly destroys your ability to take control of any part of it. I have never allowed myself to forget how horrible and uncontrollable my first few decades were.
Hell, if I could wave my hands and come up with a drug that could suppress the bottom two layers (at the very least) without having any other negative effect (low T, etc.), I would immediately release it free to all men. Because having your entire being so violently coerced into paying attention to a woman regardless of your actual intent really does suck donkey’s balls.
But hey, evolution as a whole sucks.
Word of the day (because I suspect many humans don’t realize they fall into this category):
I didn’t say I don’t have sexual attraction. if anything my attraction has broadened since my teenage years, I find so many more types attractive than I did during peak hormonal days.
finding people sexy or beautiful isn’t the same as treating all of them as goals. you can just think hey she’s hot without needing to get in their pants.
also I’m not saying people shouldn’t try to fuck anyone, I’m saying they shouldn’t try to fuck everyone.
Demisexuals do have sexual attraction though.
It’s just they don’t really want to have sex with someone unless they first have an emotional bond (and since it’s a spectrum, some literally don’t find a person sexy at all until there’s an emotional bond).
A lot of people don’t have that limitation though - it’s not a goal or anything, they just also get sexual urges with hot people and therefore want to have sex.
Those people usually are up for / have one night stands for example, because they don’t really need any emotional connection to want to have sex.
It’s a biological drive. Animals have evolved to desire multiple partners because it increases the chance of genetically healthy offspring.
Many people are completely controlled by their reptilian brain and their instinctual desires.
Humans are susceptible to programming. We learn how to behave from our environment. The culture uses hyper sexuality to attract attention of the animal brain. This has caused it a feedback loop of extreme hyper sexuality. Good luck navigating this world if you’ve avoided it and are trying to find a partner that does the same.
Animals have evolved to desire multiple partners because it increases the chance of genetically healthy offspring.
Except the success strategies between males and females of most mammalian species - especially apes, like us - is vastly different.
Men want to spread their seed as widely as possible, because their selfish gene can be almost trivially spread and create dozens to hundreds of offspring with sufficient women.
Women need to be more careful, because they need 9 months to bring a child to term, and then another decade-plus before that child begins to support itself in any real way. That is a massive investment. On the one hand, they want strong men to sire their children, because that results in strong offspring for her. On the other hand, most strong men know how in-demand they are, so in the absence of forced monogamy, they (historically) have been very hard to lock down. So once they have a child or two and the father wanders off for greener pastures, these same women look for less-desirable men who can be consistent and reliable providers, and who can be easily manipulated with promises of sex to raise another man’s children for him.
This is borne out by genetic analysis of our human history: for most of it, 19 women had children for every man who did. Things like Harems arose not only because powerful men desired exclusive access to many women, but also because women wanted sexual protection from desperate and undesirable men whose options for sexual success were minimal to none.
Hypergamy is a thing.
Problem is, hypergamy produces a large underclass of socially unstable and potentially violent men with few to no options for having children of their own. Religion saw this, and sought to bring stability to emerging societies by implementing monogamy and suppressing women’s hypergamous natures via social mores.
Hot girl problems. It’s a real thing and leads to a tremendous amount of loneliness for them. If you are very clear and the guys aren’t all invested already, then it’s a great way to start a legit friendship. Problem is that with a lot of cute girls, they have had so many bad experiences with guys putting them in the girlfriend zone that they just end up jaded.
It’s our responsibility as individuals never to get jaded, and also to be honest with ourselves about what kind of energy are we putting out there. Is the OP crossing boundaries with these guys, suggesting they may become more by accepting their overly nice gestures, actions, texts and gifts? If not, then it’s the guys fault.
She could always make some girl friends but we all know how difficult THAT is. Hot women need some accountabilityv though if they’re ever going to get out of this rut
Girl needs a gayfriend.
Gay dudes get all the ladies.
Perhaps instead of teasing the queer kids in highschool, Chad’s shoulda been taking notes.
And every chad should have a gay guy friend. The women will always be around. The law of averages says the chad will end up with lots of options that find him desirable. Plus having a gay guy friend will likely improve said chad in various ways that most women like.
I had a gay friend and then fell for his straight female best friend. It didn’t go well.
this actually sounds like a good idea.
Your comment reminded me of this SNL skit, straight male friend : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA0PwmQMVG8
This a premium shitpost. I fucking love it
Hits too close to truth to qualify for a shitpost. And I am saying that as a man, observing…
Who says satire/shitpostery can’t cut close to the bone? The best ones are the ones that make us evaluate ourselves under a critical lens.
I don’t dispute the point for satire, but shitposts never struck me as being concerned with reality… Maybe I just misunderstand the genre.
Yeah, I’m with you. My understanding of the term “shitpost” is that it’s, by definition, low-effort and/or low-quality.
Do what I do: Be fat and ugly. Not only will you not be in the girlfriend zone, men will go out of their way to make sure you know they “don’t see you that way” regardless if you were interested or not.
I don’t think I’m fat and ugly but I did start putting out mad lesbian energy (I’m queer but not strictly into any one gender) and men now just think I won’t be into them either way so they just talk to me like a human. To think of all the friendships I lost to shitty guys in my 20s when I could’ve just said I was gay the whole time…
if you lost the friendships because you aren’t gay then they weren’t going to be any good. that’s not losing friendships that’s you being neo dodging all the bullshit coming your way
Oof.
And that username; double oof.
Yey to us fat chicks! for real when I was super fit and beatiful having friends was hard, even at work! Now that I’m fat I’m much more relaxed, have a nice mixed (men and women) group of friends and don’t worry about bosses wanting to fuck me
Edit: Also I want to add 2 things for the younger ones:
-
A bad relationship is worst than no relationship
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If you are not happy and confortable by yourself you’ll never be happy with someone else
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I hate that this is satire but also pretty much true. Men are not generally socialized to recognize uncomplicated, unsexual fondness for a woman.
On the flipside it was very difficult as a nerdy nice guy to get some women to understand that when I said lets do x I really meant as friends because not everyone is actually sexually interested in you. Sometimes I just wanted to see a movie with someone I thought was a friend
Yeah! It’s an intersectional, social issue. I’ve had just a couple woman adamantly insist to me that men could not be friends with women, in a completely platonic way.
I think they are wrong, in an absolute sense, but in popular Western society, they are right 8 times out of 10.
But… You’re a nerd and I’m like… Kinda pretty? Shouldn’t you want to fuck my brains out and this is a trap?
Goddamnit Laura I get that you’re a 6.5/10 and yes I think you’re pretty but also we both like the same obscure RPG and I just want someone to understand some of my fucking jokes holy shiiiiiiit
More like" I get that most guys are asking you to the movies because they want to make out but I want to see and talk about this movie with you because Im interested in what you think and Im not interested in dating you". Sometimes the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, you know?
I’m not sure I’m even capable of not wanting to sleep with a woman that I get along well with. Like, I don’t ACT on those feelings so as not to fuck up good friendship but they are there.
Thanks for sharing. I definitely find people far more attractive once I get to know them than as strangers.
It’s okay to feel like that, you just need to be in control of your actions and in your case you are! So good job
This is basically the plot of When Harry Met Sally.
The thing about socialization is that it’s ongoing throughout life. A guy having male friends who can tell him “idk bro sounds like platonic affection” can help him learn even as an adult
I very much agree. I had to be told this, myself, before I really understood that I’d allowed a toxic sort of personality trait to cultivate.
Eh, I’m just aplatonic. I don’t get anything from friendship and I generally don’t understand it. It makes it very difficult to date.
Do you mean aplotinic with promising sexual partners (presumably women)? or, are you generally aplotinic, as in you lack interest in friendships with anyone?
– Jenny Nicholson, “The Last Bronycon”
This reads a bit like satire. Really good satire!
The “girlfriend-zone” is a word im stealing from this…
It’s both satire and a reversal of the same experience.
She’s being too nice.
It’s the Fuck Zone,and too many guys put all the women in it who aren’t in the Mom Zone or the Bitch Zone (and there’s some overlap there).
just don’t break both your arms, apparently that causes an expansion of the fuck zone
Oh, it’s definitely satire, making fun of “nice guys” who complain that they’ve been “friendzoned”.
The horror, friendship!
but I’m NICE! How couldn’t she love me?
Congrats on meeting the bare minimum of being a decent human, fucko.
Also so often they aren’t nice, they just think they are.
But for real. Wash frequently, groom yourself, get out of the house, and start making platonic friends. From there learn to flirt. Oh also, acknowledge the reality of how attractive you are and while it’s totally cool to shoot above your range, accept that you’re probably going to get someone similarly desirable to you. Oh and get your mental and emotional health under a certain level of control, emotional labor is part of a relationship but so often I see lonely people seeking codependency.
I was once a weirdo loser who couldn’t get a partner, and anyone who can’t do the above needs to take a good long look at why and resolve those issues. If you can’t be happy single a relationship won’t make you happier, they’re more of happiness multipliers.
get out of the house,
But the sun is out there. I think I’ll stay where the giant nuclear fusion reactor can’t see me
Be interesting and affable don’t be boring and mean.
Yup, you’re nice but are you interesting and fun to hang with?
Hopefully as they age they realize the friend zone never existed and these people either never saw them as potential mates/dates or they did and the guy did something to change that.
Eh i would say the friend zone absolutely exists.
My wife tried to friend zone me early in our relationship. She wanted to date around and still be friends with me. I told her that wasnt ok with me because i had stronger feelings for her than that and id be miserable. I cut ties.
A few months later she asked me on a date out of the blue. I spoke my peace that to me, this was a real date. Well, that was almost 13 years ago and we just had our 9th wedding anniversary
I did something similar with a women I felt strongly about. I shot my shot and I got something like “I don’t know if I want to be with anyone right now. Not even like a hook up.” as an answer. I obviosuly took that as a “No” and let the subject drop. I wasn’t angry or outraged that she didn’t give me the answer I wanted. Disappointed, yes. Maybe even a bit sad.
But I harbored no animosity towards her. She didn’t owe me a fucking thing. But I did believe it wasn’t fair to myself or her to try to maintain a friendship when it was always going to be colored by my romantic interest in her. It didn’t feel honest. So I quietly let it and her go.
About 8 months later, she found out I was leaving town for another city. She showed up at my job and basically begged me to get into her car. We drove around for a couple of hours while she brought up all the silly shit we used to joke about like running away to Europe together and similar while all but pleading with me to stay.
I had found out months back that she was sleeping around with practically all my male friends the entire time I was chasing her and even after turning me down. I reiterate that she didn’t owe me anything but I felt so god damn disrespected and foolish. I just calmly said that my leaving town was set in stone and that I was seeing somebody. She didn’t take it well and I legitimately thought she was going to drive us off a bridge a few times.
Tl;dr Had a crush on a girl and got turned down. End friendship because I don’t want to get hurt when she sees other men. Girl comes back later begging me to stay when she finds out I’m leaving town. Doesn’t know that I know she’s been fucking around with my friends during the entirety of our friendship and thereafter. Tell her no and she activates berserker mode.
I refer you to the second part “or the guy did something to change that”. You walking away made her reconsider how she valued you.
I think it is satire… I realized once I read the bolded “it’s just how they’re wired, biologically.” But yes indeed, very good satire.
I have an opposite problem. When I (I’m a guy btw) was in school, I sometimes just want to have friends but whenever I talked to girls, I worry that girls would just think I have some other motive (which it seems to me like every boy in my class do just want romantic relationships). Like maybe I’m asexual/aromantic, but I never wanted those types of relationships, I prefer a long lasting friendship.
(I don’t have much friends either way, regardless of gender; current amount of friends is: zero; because I just stopped talking to people after highschool, oh well 🤷♂️)
That was pretty much it for me with a few different female friends. It wasn’t so much “hey you’re hot and I wanna sleep with you rather than just be friends” it was “hey, I really enjoy spending time with you and I’m happy being around you, but I’ve been down this road before and I know it probably ends when you get a new boyfriend so… maybe I can be that boyfriend and we can continue to enjoy spending time together”
I (straight male) always found it easy to connect with girls, but I was also raised in a very feminist family (despite my mother being nominally conservative).
Dating is a lot of work and vulnerability and an attempt at ‘clicking’ on many more levels than friendship. It definitely wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in dating (I very much was), but ‘Gorl fun AND pretty’ just wasn’t enough to automatically spark my interest in romance. ‘Gorl fun’ meant possible friend; ‘Gorl pretty’ was most girls, because girls pretty.
I got spontaneously voted the most handsome boy in the class when I was in 10th grade though. Always burnished that particular memory on the Altar of Ego.
God, that final bit. I was a resident assistant for my dorm in college for a year. Didn’t date anyone that year. Had plenty of crushes, including plenty from the dorm. At the end of the year, my coworkers (female RAs) were like, “yeah we were all so surprised you didn’t go out with anyone, like, half the girls here were in love with you.” And I just stared into the middle distance, “and you didn’t think to tell me???”
“We thought you knew!”
“I DID NOT”
How were you supposed to know? If half the girls acted the same then how could you know that anything was afoot?
Never really thought about it that way, but that’s a decent point.
Gender norms make things so fucking hard XD
Yeah. It all worked out. Married a nice person, have a kid, the whole deal. But god I could not read the room for YEARS.
It can get really confusing. I was one of the only out bisexual guys at my school in the 1990s. In my senior year there were two girls who individually always expressed a desire to hang out and talk but took none of the opportunities offered to do exactly this. I was confused because they were both stunning and always kind of weird around me so I couldn’t figure out what they wanted because it clearly wasn’t a relationship (Im not stunning). That was 30 years ago. Both are married to lovely women and have been out for decades now. What they wanted to talk about was how I knew I wasn’t straight. I wasn’t able to figure that out even though I knew they weren’t into me because reading the room has always been a challenge.
Was your grandma allowed to vote, and how many times did she vote? I kid ;)
Vote early, vote often!
Same man. A lot of this just boils down to poor communication between the sexes
I ended up marrying my best (girl)friend from high school. We both went into it wanting friendship, were attracted to each other (while in relationships), and ended up getting pushed together by a mutual former friend.
I honestly think this was the best way for this to develop, because we were already close and good friends before we dated, and didn’t try to make a relationship out of it.
Hey, as a flavour of aro ace myself the feelings of not wanting those types of relationships and not knowing specifically took a long time to figure out. If you want to talk about it, you can DM me or come over to [email protected] or [email protected] there are slao aromantic communities on lemmy as well.
If you can afford it get therapy. You show some social anxiety here and that can be addressed.
Solution: Be unattractive.
Alternate solution: don’t be attractive
I love friend-zoning people. I’ve got, like, ten friends meow.
Make sure to check the food supplies though. Starvation is the highest risk when overcrowding the friendzone.
Oh… shhhhiiiiiiiiiiit…
be gay
That has mixed success for various women in my experience.
dark
I’m guessing most of the younger crowd here has never seen When Harry Met Sally.
I wonder if she’s an egg or at least a lesbian
I think she’s just hot and trying to make friends. Like, I know lesbians with similar experiences and I’ve met trans men who put out in order to get to be friends with guys before transitioning, but I’ve met plenty of cishet women who thought they’d made a cool new friend only to have him hit on her and break off the friendship over it
Don’t have to be either to want opposite sex friends who are just friends.
