4 Things You Can Do When You Are In The Friend Zone by Atala

Recently, someone I know was wondering what was going on in the head of this girl he was interested in. They were friends, he said, but he wanted more than just friendship, and he had let her know this.

However, she was non-commital; not quite agreeing that they should take their friendship to the next level, yet not wanting to end the friendship.

An overwhelming number of responses to the thread started gave an instant diagnosis – she had locked him and sealed him tight into that cage from which there was no escape - the Friend Zone.

This meant that there was no point in trying to get her to see him as more than a friend, because that all he would ever be to her. And from the tone of those responses, the Friend Zone was absolutely not a place that anyone should be happy to be in.


It’s not too difficult to see why. Like I always say, Happiness is What You Get minus What You Expect, so it’s clear that if someone has been friendzoned so that the friendship they are getting is much less than the romance they expect, they’re going to be unhappy, especially as Friendship is these days sold as being much inferior to Romance (you know that’s true when you often hear phrases like “he’s only a friend”).

So it looks like there really are just four options for the friendzoned man (and yes, the overwhelming number of people in the Friend Zone are men):

- Learn to live with it. Sure, for a while, he might have to endure the pain of seeing the girl he loves look at him differently from how he would like to be looked at. There’s also the Big Question of why she doesn’t love him back – a question which, typically, most friendzoners are very evasive on, because honesty might lead to an overreaction and the possible end of the friendship. But supposedly, if he loves something, he should set it free, etc. etc. Hopefully, after a while, the feelings will diminish when he sees that the person that he has placed on a pedestal has failings and disgusting habits like everyone else, and the friendship will become more relaxed and natural.

- Learn to live with it, but keep hoping for something better. The problem, the friendzoned person believes, is that the object of his affection doesn’t really know him. After all, how could anyone in their right mind possibly resist the combination of good looks, charm, wit, fashion, intelligence and ambition that are packaged together in him? Not a problem; he will keep on being friends with her while showing what a wonderful, loving and exciting person he is. Then one day, the penny will drop, the scales will fall off the eyes, and BANG! Two shall become one.

- Don’t take no for an answer. Like the option above, the friendzoned believes he is the full package, with a generous double measure added on top, pressed down and thoroughly shaken together. The difference is that he doesn’t believe in hoping and waiting. Instead, he proceeds to bombard the girl of his dreams with cards, attention, flowers, chocolate, candlelit dinners, mushy ballads, and lyricalious poetry that make it very clear what he believes: that he should be the number one person – in fact, the only person – in her life. By the time he is done, she has either submitted to the relentless onslaught, responded with complete indifference, or has severed all communication and got a court injunction barring him from coming within five kilometres of her. Or there’s the possibility that the he simply runs out of steam during the barrage, which leaves him with just one more option:

- Cut loose and walk away. Unless the object of the friendzoned person’s affection is that rare, special soul – so full pure goodness that she just cannot be given up like that – this is what many people in the friend zone eventually do. Of course, life is not black and white, and taking this course of action could mean anything from holding back a bit and reducing the number of times they meet, to deleting her phone number and emails, tearing up her photos and moving to a completely different city where her memories will not haunt him. The irony can be that sometimes, it is the very act of doing this that makes the friendzoner realize what a devastating combination of good looks, charm, wit, fashion, intelligence and ambition that were packaged together in him, and she now starts figuring out how to get together with him.

Of course, the inherently unstable friendzone scenario is resolved much faster if both parties are honest about how they feel; ambiguity can be a breeding ground for false hope. But I suspect that sometimes, the object of affection might like the affection too much to let the friendzoned person walk away, even if she doesn’t care enough for them to be in the relationship that they want. So she keeps him dangling with ‘maybes’, which is just plain wicked. But even with its prospect for terminal heartache, I don’t think that the Friend Zone is going to disappear from the relationship landscape anytime soon, as long as most of us nurse in ourselves a desire to love – and to be loved.