I’m too lazy to write a real post today, so I thought I’d point you all to a pretty decent analysis of the dreaded “friend zone” by Foz Meadows on goodreads.
Here she is addressing the “Nice Guys” of the world:
[S]omewhere along the line, you’ve got it into your head that if you’re romantically interested in a girl who sees you only as a friend, her failure to reciprocate your feelings is just that: a failing. That because you’re nice and treat her well, she therefore owes you at least one opportunity to present yourself as a viable sexual candidate, even if she’s already made it clear that this isn’t what she wants. That because she legitimately enjoys a friendship that you find painful (and which you’re under no obligation to continue), she is using you. That if a man wants more than friendship with a woman, then the friendship itself doesn’t even attain the status of a consolation prize, but is instead viewed as hell: a punishment to be endured because, so long as he thinks she owes him that golden opportunity, he is bound to persist in an association that hurts him – not because he cares about the friendship, but because he feels he’s invested too much kindness not to stick around for the (surely inevitable, albeit delayed) payoff.
Seriously, Nice Guys, if you think of your friendship with a woman as a means to an end, or some kind of purgatory, then it’s not really a friendship, and you’re doing both yourself and your crush a disservice by persisting in it. (I learned this lesson myself the hard way, a long time before there were helpful internet posts explaining to me why Nice Guying was a recipe for crappiness all around.)
Speaking of learning: I also learned from Foz Meadows’ post that there is a Wikipedia entry for “friend zone,” complete with advice on how dudes can avoid getting “friendzoned” in the first place.
Several advisers urged men, during the initial dates, to touch women physically in appropriate places such as elbows or shoulders as a means of increasing the sexual tension. … Adviser Ali Binazir agrees, and suggested for the man to be a “little bit dangerous”, not in a violent sense, but “with a bit of an edge to them”, and be unpredictable and feel “comfortable in their skin as sexual beings.”
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia … for Your Penis*.
Also: Here is the official Friend Zone anthem, “Consolation Prize” by Orange Juice. Lyrics here.
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* Hetero cis penis only.
Kilo, i feel similar. In the comic, derp spent 2 weeks holding hands with the girl. For some teens this is the big first experience with a woman, the first time anyone has shown any overt interest in them. I can remember the hormone rushs an experience like that entails, and its no small thing.
Kilo, where are you going with the grey a? That guys get put in the zone by grey a girls?
pillowinhell: the other way around. It might be that some of the guys are slightly on the grey a scale, but don’t know about it, and assume that their patterns of attraction are the regular sexual patterns of attraction because they experience them as reasonably close to what other people are experiencing. For example, they might be partially demisexual, and the friendship is a crucial factor in their developing sexual attraction. Now, as pecunium said earlier,for women with different attraction patterns,”The longer there isn’t an expression of romantic interest, the more likely they [the guys] are to be filed as, “just friends”.” Thus the slightly grey-a guys get put in the zone by non-a girls.
Or, of course, grey-a girls by non-a guys, and all other permutations.
See for example this thread on the grey-a forum at aven: http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?/topic/72581-demi-sexuals-and-the-friend-zone/
Eh. Maybe. Keep in mind though that Aces are only about two to three percent of the general population. And nice guys who pull this shit are a pretty common occurance in many womens lives. Not to say that no ace can be an asshole, but its the sense of entitlement to sex that a key feature here, and is far more indicative of the more mainstream sexuality. Notice that your example shows the person is disappointed, not angry or enraged. Also, greys tend to own that the “problem” is theirs…it takes a while for greys to experience sexual or romantic attraction. Where as Nice Guys firmly place fault on the women they want. In a Nice Guys eyes, he can do no wrong.
Note that I use the masculine pronoun because I’m a woman, I have no idea what Nice Gals are like.
Le John: You’re losing the good faith points.
Well another thing is, I also tend to get a little bit detached- in my mind, initially what I was saying could just as easily have been a fabrication.
There’s a little bit detached, and their’s making shit up. You NEVER used female, until all of a sudden you were claiming you only used it.
You weren’t willing to do the thirty seconds worth of work to check and see what you’d written.
Either you do something (always use females, because that’s the way you talk), or you don’t.
I may not remember exactly what I said, but this is a persistent medium. I can check. When I say I said something, it behooves me to make sure.
One of the most important things, IMO, to maintaining reasonable discussion, esp. debate, is owning one’s ideas. The Trollish types don’t. They want to be, “right” and they want to be, “provocative”, but they don’t want to be called on the shit they say. So they bob, and weave, and move the goalposts and pretend they didn’t argue for something which was the logical; sometimes essential, conclusion to the things they said (see Brandon, we can give you pointers, if you like).
So I recommend that you take the time to see just what you did say, rather than leaving it to others to check. One, you’ll be less likely to be chewing on your socks, and two, it’s not the best of goodwill generators to cause other people to go and look at the things you said, which you can’t be arsed to doublecheck. It feels as if you don’t respect my intelligence when I find so many examples of a thing you just told me you never do.
I have no idea what to make of, , I can’t think of her really as a woman, because it strikes me that if you can’t think of her as a woman; only as, “a female” that you aren’t really seeing her as a person.
Le John: Kilo, i feel similar. In the comic, derp spent 2 weeks holding hands with the girl. For some teens this is the big first experience with a woman, the first time anyone has shown any overt interest in them. I can remember the hormone rushs an experience like that entails, and its no small thing.
1: Assumes facts not in evidence.
You have no way of knowing that this is by a teen, nor that it is aimed at teens. I think it’s actually an assumption contrary to fact. If it’s someone’s first experience they have no basis for the rage. They have no way to know if this is a one of kind moment, or something which is going to happen all the time.
I’m in my 40s. I’ve been having falling for women since my teens. I had lots of times, esp. in my teens, where it didn’t go much of anywhere. It was painful, frustrating, sometimes it really hurt.
Rage? No.
2: You are being an apologist. You are saying people who have hormonal rushes should be given slack for fits of rage and hatred.
Nope. Comforted if they are hurting, sure. But rage is out of proportion. No one is actually injured when someone doesn’t reciprocate affection.
Those hormonal rushes, they don’t go away as you get older. They just get more familiar. I am tolerant of a two-year old who is throwing a fit because they are being denied something because they don’t know any better. A 15 year old? No. A 30 year old. Not even a little bit.
Derp is telling the world this is a normal thing. He’s asking for validation of his feelings. You are giving him some. You are encouraging him to act like a two-year old child told he can’t have a banana.
Poring over your old comments? Hardly. I knew you were lying about never calling your girlfriend a woman because I have this thing called a “memory”. I went back a page and sure enough, there you were referring to her as a woman.
Duh. Have you actually read any other threads at all? Unfortunately they’re not the only ones who come here to troll…
Le John: I like what you all did- poring through comments etc to sort of rigorously test my sincerity etc.
This isn’t a “test”. It most certainly isn’t a test of your sincerity. NWO and Arks, and Antz and TS and Brandon are all sincere. Some were so sincere they were banned.
It’s not even a test of your honesty. If you post enough your character will become apparent.
If I were being cynical I’d say it was a test of our tolerance. The sort of thing a gaslighter might do to see how much slack was available. The sort of thing someone planning a trolling spree might do.
I’m not calling you a troll. I’m reserving judgement. I am letting you know that your responses on this subject are bothering me. There is a level of claimed lack of awareness I find hard to credit. It may be you are completely unused to being fact checked, and you are that sloppy with your thinking, and you can’t remember what you said.
If so, we’ll cope, but it probably won’t be easy on you. Because the crowd here isn’t very tolerant of people who change their story, no matter what the claimed reason is.
Le John, you and your partner are adults. You are involved in an adult relationship, with adult responsibilities and expectations towards one another. That can be a scary thing sometimes, but it is a true thing, and you need to accept it to respect yourself and to respect your partner.
I’m newly 23, and if my partner couldn’t bring himself to think of/refer to me as a woman I would get out immediately. That would be true even if I was dating someone my own age (though it’s especially true in my current circumstances — holy floating mushrooms would that be creepy).
Adulthood isn’t perfect certainty about everything, by the way. You can be an adult and have your life be in flux, or not be totally sure who you are, or make stupid mistakes. I wonder if you’re imagining “adults” the way a young child would — as totally problem-free people in total control of every aspect of their own lives. None such people exist. There will not be a point when you turn into one.
Do you understand what this site is about? Look at the header.
No one’s testing your sincerity, you’ll do that on your own. But it’s good to own what you’ve said previously.
If you want to keep claiming you didn’t say what you said or think that we should forget what you’ve said, all you’ll do is remind us of certain asspimples who have plagued the board before.
Le john I like how you doubled down on calling women females by listing so many reasons. Including your immaturity, but especially hers? The fact that you don’t chose to see yourself as an adult is your problem. Making it the reason for continuing to grate on others peoples nerves when they’ve specifically asked you to stop is being a jerk. I’m not responsible for helping you to feel like a man so you can realize your girlfriend is, in fact, a woman.
Gah! I’m not twenty-five yet, and if anyone called me ‘boy’ outside of very restricted circumstances that I control, I would be PISSED. I EARNED every ounce of my manhood, dammit, and you either recognize it or GTFO.
The idea that my maturity would be teenaged at this point would leave me flabbergasted. I mean, sure, when I was a teenager I was dealing with heavy shit… but since then, I’ve wandered a couple different countries, had a SLEW of jobs, gotten married, come out, cut off family members, made friends who actually know what’s going on with me…
Oh god I never want to be a teenager again EVER. D: I was such a ponce!
LBT, I had a pretty sheltered childhood in many respects but I can’t imagine not being considered an adult by at least the age of majority. In my family, it sixteen is adulthood. And we’re expected to increasingly take on both the responsibilites and freedoms. Though my mother says, you’re not finished growing into that role until you’ve spent ten years living outside of your parents house.
RE: pillowinhell
In my mind, I hit adulthood when I dealt with my rape, which was when I was sixteen. It was my (highly unpleasant) rite of passage because it involved me dealing with major fallout with pretty much no outside assistance. I didn’t expect anyone to call me an adult, and I obviously still didn’t know crap about how to properly job hunt or sign a lease, but in my mind, I was an adult from then on out. Period.
Apparently I’m weird though. I HATED the idea of being a child.
pillowinhell, you are right, but they are grays who know that they are gray, likely because their position on the spectrum is so obviously different from what “regular” sexuality is. (I probably should have said gray-s instead of gray-a.) Someone who is closer to the sexual side might not even know that he or she is different.
You know, before reading this thread I had no idea how different my perception of how I experience attraction was from others. See the quote above. How often do you think “I didn’t have a boner for this girl, but she was very nice and considerate to me, so now I have a boner?” Boners don’t work that way! Well, mine does, if not necessarily in a deterministic way. Another post was even more striking, but I can’t find it right now. It made me feel like “I’m not people” (which I am sure Cliff did not mean to imply). I certainly did not think of myself as anything but completely sexual, but after more reading some of it fits (and some doesn’t). If some people are more like me in that regard, the whole pattern would make sense.
And the rage… I think it’s an understandable (but not excusable!) reaction to persistent frustration, just like despair and self-hatred are.
LBT, that’s a shitty rite of passage into adulthood. Lots of hugs if you want them.
My, I’m definitely an adult now moment was in standing up to my abusive Grandmother. I calmy explained to her that hitting me or threatening to hit me would no longer be tolerated and what I would do should she continue her behaviour. I then calmly walked out of the house and waited for my parents to return.
pecunium:
Herp does talk about “class” in the first panel, which seems to suggest that the characters are teens or in their early twenties.
Kilo, I’m not well versed on all terminology floating around the asexual community and what research I’ve done has shown me there seem to be some rather hot debates about the subject, so if it is ok, I’d like to ask you to clarify something.
You know, before reading this thread I had no idea how different my perception of how I experience attraction was from others. See the quote above.How often do you think “I didn’t have a boner for this girl, but she was very nice and considerate to me, so now I have a boner?” Boners don’t work that way! Well, mine does, if not necessarily in a deterministic way.
What do you mean by that? I’m thrown by the “not necessarily in a deterministic way”. It reads to me like you are saying you are far more likely to develop a sexual attraction for someone after friendship, but just because someone is friendly and nice to you, you don’t automatically develop sexual attraction. Nor do you develop sexual attraction to all your friends. That doesn’t seem particularly distinguishing as a characteristic — “Someone being nice and considerate to me might make them attractive to me, or it might not”.
I have the feeling I’m misreading what you were actually trying to say there.
RE: LC
Not kilo, so can’t speak for them, but I’m gray-a in a sorta similar but more intense fashion. (Very quick and sloppy explanation: I mate for life. Lose hubby, quite happy being celibate and single ever after.)
I pretty much never feel attraction to people I don’t know well. It is an alien experience to me. I can’t comprehend going on a date with someone I don’t know because what the hell would be the point? The concept of dating in general is bizarre to me.
Obviously, you can’t make me want to bone you by being my friend. But I won’t even start being interested in you in any other context, because I don’t know you, and ergo, I can’t be attracted to you. And for men, apparently that IS bizarre. (“What, you don’t find $PERSON hot?” No. No I don’t. I might find them aesthetically INTERESTING, but I’d feel the same way studying art. I DON’T WANT TO BONE YOUR COLLAGE, DUDE.)
I got the sense that kilo was trying to say something along those lines. (Feel free to tell me to STFU if I’m wrong, kilo.)
LC, i’m not too familiar with the terminology myself. What I mean with “not deterministically” is that it does not happen in every case, but it often/usually does; whereas Cliff made it seem like it is something that doesn’t happen. It’s also pretty much required, I can’t remember being attracted to someone I didn’t like as a person. And there are some hard boundaries – for example, someone in a monogamous relationship with someone else, or is much too old/too young or of the wrong gender is almost certainly not sexually attractive to me.
Developing attraction for someone who I thought was not really attractive after finding out that they are nice and amazing is something that happens relatively often. And it’s not “They are awesome and therefore I don’t mind that they’re ugly”, it’s “they are so cute and incredibly hot, how didn’t I see that for the first two months? Am I blind?”
Ah kilo, that kind of understandable is only understandable if you accept the idea that the other person must give you what you want.
I have owned many pets. Right now I have a budgie. Everyone knows that budgies make good pets because they are affectionate and intelligent beings. I have literally spent two YEARS attempting to befriend Sqwaukbox. Yet despite all of my efforts to give my bird the best possible environment and my patience in trying to win my birds trust, I got nothing. My bird does not want to be handled, it consistently ignores me when outside of its cage. Now, it might be understandable that I’m frustrated with the situation, having tried a variety of advice on befriending my bird. My bird responds to other people but not me. Does it make any sense to you that I should be angry? That I blame the bird for being itself and deciding that I’m not someone it wants to interact with? Shall I curse my bird for daring to like other people? No. I accept that Squawkbox isn’t comfortable with me. And I continue to treat my bird well and with respect. Some day, should a friend really like my bird and want it I will give Sqwuakbox to them if I see that the bird will bond with the person, because its in the birds best interest.
You’re getting hung up on the idea of sex and romance and how it should go. When you apply the same reasoning to other scenarios you see how quickly the reasoning falls apart.
I’m grey, so I’m quite aware of how long it can take to realize that there’s a rarely spoken about sexuality, or the ways in which it differs.
@LBT – *nod*, that sounds more in line with what some of my friends have described it as – more of a “necessary but not sufficient” kind of thing. I just found the wording backwards, so it confused me.
RE: LC
I wouldn’t even use the words “necessary but not sufficient,” because I don’t LOOK for romantic or sexual relationships. I don’t WANT to date or seek it out of my own accord. It’s like… I dunno. Baked Alaska. I don’t go around LOOKING for Baked Alaska, and can’t fathom people who bemoan their lack of Baked Alaska.
My husband was a complete screwball thrown at me from left field. (Though to be fair, he thought he was straight till then, so it was a screwball for him too.)
@kilo
See, that’s interesting, as I didn’t read Cliff that way at all. Or rather, I read Cliff as saying “you being nice does not produce sexual attraction” – they are just a separate thing. I find it fascinating that you are sexually attracted to almost everyone who is nice to you. (Depending on how large a percentage “often/usually” is.) I find that incredibly rare. I know lots of people for whom it is a major component of attraction, or a prerequisite to some degree, but not where it actually is pretty much a guarantee of attraction.
Yeah, I always find that fun. Don’t beat yourself up about it too much, though, it’s a really common experience as far as I can tell.