Return to the Friend Zone
An anonymous guest post
Here’s another guest post from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous. Enjoy?
Hi Bryan,
Having been friendzoned several times in my youth I cannot but agree on the advice you dispense.
I would like to point out, however, that the way in which the advice is dispensed may appear somehow mysterious to the person who finds him/herself friendzoned for the first time (a bit like being told that the square built on the hypotenuse of a square triangle equals to the sum of those built on the sides, but not been shown WHY).
In other words, while the advice taker may find the advice intellectually sound, they might find it psychologically insufficient, as if there were a missing step.
The missing step I would use if I were to offer such advice to a young person would be this:
Dear Friend:
Make a list of all the people you know reasonably well, ranking them from the most attractive down to the less and less attractive: P1, P2, P3...
On this list, find the first person you find sufficiently unattractive that you would NOT want to date them, say P32.
For good measure, go down the list ten more positions to, say, P42.
YOU are P42 to the person you are trying to convince to date you.
As soon as you conceive in your mind a line of argument or conduct that you think might persuade this person, place in from of yourself two cards, YES and NO, start a 60 second timer and, for 60 seconds, visualize as vividly as possible P42 working that same line of argumento or conduct on YOU.
When the timer goes off, without thinking any further, immediately slap the card that answers the question: would I date P42?
Do this a few times and you will feel better about the decision that is best for both of you: saying goodbye.
Feel free to share this if you find it useful.
Best
[redacted]
Didn't we just learn that most women find most men unattractive? The lessons we previously learned--that charm, humor and devotion matter--are available to the man in the friendzone. No, you aren't likely to make yourself physically more attractive, but she doesn't find most men attractive. I found myself relegated to this zone more than most (that's a book in itself), but I found my way out more than once as well, and the answer is in the last post. That isn't to say that one should always keep pursuing, because it's not always the right answer (and when it is the right answer it may be the right answer as part of a larger strategy of finding a mate, including pursuing other alternatives), but there are circumstances where one can reasonably conclude that were a match to happen it would be a very high quality match. I'm more than 3 decades into my version of this story and I couldn't recommend it more highly. Imagine you could be with P1 for the rest of your life. I pulled it off. It was not easy! We built emotional intimacy that was incongruent with a friendship, and most everyone would advise against doing that. But in doing that I was able to confirm that she was not just superficially appealing, not just the most attractive young woman in my social circle, but also someone I could spend my life with. And when we made the move from friendship to a romantic relationship, we had a real connection and were quickly able to build something much different from our other relationships.
I think this is bad advice if, as I presume, "Dear Friend" is a straight man being friendzoned by a woman. Women are not men! Most women are simply not capable of ranking the men they know on a 1D attractiveness scale, and even if they were, the list would change so frequently that by the time a woman wrote it down, a man's place in it would be different.
Women can be, and very often are, convinced by a man that he is attractive. A man "getting a woman to sleep with him" is a master trope in literature/TV/movies. A very common, possibly even the modal, marriage origin story I hear, is the husband saying he loved her at first sight, while she "took some convincing." In other words, he was in the friendzone.
This doesn't entail staying in the friendzone is the better option, but a man should never make the mistake of thinking that a woman's preferences are as fixed as his.