Or rather we need one, actually it’s not even that, we need to not use “Friend-zone” as a verb. I thought I had posted about this but I guess I just had plans to that were interrupted by my being fired and subsequent pity party. Having read a bazillion posts about the phenomena surrounding the friend zone, and the backlash against those posts I just want to lay it out here.
Here’s the thing, there most certainly is a very real and fairly common relational space, where one party is has unrequited romantic interest in a second party, who either is or isn’t aware of the romantic interest, but neither party will do something about it because they share a friendship that is valuable to both parties. We call it the Friend Zone, and we need to have a word for it.
In that case the party one is in the “Friend-zone” however, party two is not “friend- zoning” party one, or doing anything else wrong. The situation may be painful for party one, and uncomfortable for both but that isn’t because of wrong doing, it’s just how life works.
That understanding of the Friend-zone is something I’ve personally experienced for both sides and I’m annoyed when people tried to deny those experiences because of people claiming that they are “being friend-zoned.”
It seems to start with a communication breakdown, often one party will hang out with a second party that they have romantic or sexual interest in, and fail to express the nature of their interest, and then becomes upset that these non-sexual and non-romantic times were interpreted as gestures of friendship. Yes they are in the friend zone but if anything they put themselves there by trying to use friendship as a gateway to something else. Which popular culture tells us is one of the best ways to find your true love, so that hurts.
Maybe it doesn’t work all the time.
It can be more complicated, the romantic or sexual feeling may develop in one party over time, but not the other. So it isn’t either parties fault.
The claim that someone has friend-zoned you is almost always an unfair accusation, unless a person deliberately uses your interest in them in order to get favors from you and then plays a “let’s be friends” or “I don’t think of you that way” to slip the blame. Even then, you really should be friends with a person like that they aren’t a friend-zoner they are a user.
The problem I see with this topic is too many people are treating it like it’s a gender issue, and I’ve certainly seen more guys complain about being in the friend-zone, ore malign a female friend as a “friend-zoner” for not reacting to their advances the way they wanted.
Re-cap here, Friend-zoning is bullshit, but the “friend-zone” exists.
But there are (speaking from personal experience) women who develop unrequited crushes on their male friends and then let the grapevine to the communicating for them, leading to an uncomfortable situation where he knows she likes him, and she knows he doesn’t feel the same way, and yet they’ve never actually had a discussion on the subject. Which means he can either try to create space between the the two of them and be called a jerk or try and go on like before and be accused of leading her on, just by continuing to treat her as a friend.
Now maybe the consequences of the friend zone phenomena could be cleared up with a quick straight forward conversation, but that would require people to act like mature and honest adults.