You hear that Tacos? Your mistake was attempting to get to know the girl you are interested in as a person. Taking time to see if there was an emotional and intellectual connection that could serve as the foundation for a fulfilling relationship clearly demonstrates you were only interested in them as a sex object. If you had any respect for women you would just walk up to them and ask them flat out if they want to fuck. There was a wildly popular video on YouTube a few months back that should give you about a hundred lines you can start using to aptly demonstrate your new found esteem for women.
OP literally says “I thought she was going out of her way to know me better” but attributes this to some form of trickery or non-honesty. Post 8.
Maybe the problem is his low self-esteem, I don’t now. But he literally doesn’t know why a person would get to know another person, except to fuck them, since that’s in his question.
No umbrage taken, but, your interpretation is totally forced.
You are not understanding what ‘she friendzoned me’ meant.
"She friendzoned me’: “She (sorry, the woman was the actor) told/explainedtome/advisedme that I was not going to be her consort”. Yes, SHE! Live dangerously and boldly! The **woman **did something! SHE refused his advances. Again, the woman did something!
Stop such childishness. It is not the OP trying to rape the woman, nor give her a clitorectomy. Nor, even, relegate her to second-class citizenship. He didn’t call her a cunt because he was not worthy to be the love of her life. Rather than go into the told/explained… novella, the phrase in question is a simple truncation. Your fanciful imaginings do all a disservice, and take the OP far afield of where it should be. The poor schmuck is looking for love, and you are making him a fellow traveller and unwitting dupe of the Patriarchist Conspiracy. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Where does he attribute it to dishonesty? It probably just confused him because seriously, who jumps in to a new friendship with such vigour?
In the OP he asks if he should take her at her word or if she’s probably “playing” him, ie, tricking him for funsies. His evidence that she’s playing him is given in post 8 “but she seemed like she really wanted to get to know me.”
Young people? Since the beginning of time?
Not me. I was never in some big rush to get to know my friends better most especially when I was in my early 20s. And at the risk of sounding sexist, I am sure that’s the case for most 20 something guys. Are they fun to hang out with is mostly it.
I think we’re talking about two different things. If the issue is “he wants sex, and when he didn’t get it, he brushed me off”, then I totally agree – that’s being a jerk. If the issue is “he wants to be in a relationship with me, and when I rejected him, he didn’t want to stay friends”, then I think we disagree. It’s not unreasonable or ‘jerkish’ to want a relationship and not a friendship, any more than the opposite is. Maybe you feel differently, but relationships to me aren’t just friendships + sex – they’re quite different.
Dude, speaking as a poster you really need to dial it back. Where do you see me making such extreme claims? You’re putting a lot of nasty words in my writing that don’t exist. And you’re coming really close to being insulting. This isn’t the pit.
This sounds to me like a mirror of the OP. He implies that there is something wrong in treating another human being as simply a provider of something you want [i.e., friendship] under the auspices of budding romance.
NEITHER IS CORRECT. Friendship and romantic relationships have a lot of overlap. But They’re not identical. Someone might want a romantic relationship that involves friendship. They might want a sexual relationship that doesn’t involve friendship. They might want a friendship that doesn’t involve sex. All three are legit things to want.
If someone wants sex but not friendship, but they act all friendly-like, they’re being a jerk. If someone wants friendship but not sex, but they act all sexy-like, they’re being a jerk. If someone wants both, and they show both friendship and flirtation, they’re doing exactly the right thing.
And if they want both, but can’t have one or the other, and they decide to end the relationship entirely, they have done nothing wrong at all.
In college I had a crush on a classmate, and I told her how I felt, and she wasn’t interested. We stayed friends; when she needed a new housemate, and I needed to move out of the household of weird unpleasant people I was in, she and I both agreed I’d move into her house.
I told my housemates that I’d be moving out, they agreed, started looking for a new housemate. At which point the classmate told me she’d reconsidered, that it’d be awkward having us live together given my feelings for her.
It was a pain in the ass of her to tell me this after I’d already told my housemates I was moving out, of course, and bad move on her part. But her only mistake was timing. She was absolutely within her rights to put a boundary on our friendship based on my attraction to her. It might well have been awkward.
Relationships are tricky and weird. We should cut one another a lot of slack surrounding how folks respond to attractions and rejections.
I thought it was pretty clear these were not reciprocal scenarios, but anyway, the first scenario is where there is a romantic orientation and desire for a physical relationship related to the attention the man is giving. If his overture is rejected maintaining a platonic friend relationship can be stressful and complicated.
In the second there is no desire by either party for a romantic or physical relationship, their “friendship” involvement is based primarily on shared interests or personality compatibility. Obviously this is a continuum and the less physical attraction there is the easier it is to maintain a platonic relationship.
These scenarios are in no way equivalent. In a truly reciprocal situation where a woman’s desires for a physical or emotional relationship was rejected by the man does she want to hang out and be buddies with the object of their desire after he rejects her overtures? I think not, and you don’t see men complaining “Well she’s willing to date me, but if that’s off the table she won’t be friends with me! Harrumph!” Men intuitively understand the need for distance in these scenarios.
That women expect that this male friend link should somehow be maintained post overture rejection, and they are often angry when it’s not, is baffling to men but it’s such a pervasive female trait it’s got to be wired in on some level.
Whenever I see the word “friendzone” I mentally replace it with the word “rejected”.
“I asked a cute girl I’d been talking to on a date and she friendzoned me.”
Is really the same as:
“I asked a cute girl I’d been talking to on a date and she rejected me.”
Romantic rejection hurts, it’s ok to be a little sad or disappointed. It’s not ok to demonize a person just because they’re not interested in you romantically, but you’re not obligated to be friends with them either. I never thought romantic rejection was a very good foundation for a friendship personally.
The part that’s annoying is the whiny need to come up with a whole new word for romantic rejection and pretend there’s more depth to it than there is, but I can understand how ‘friendzone’ might feel better than calling it what it is.
I would feel a whole lot better about the word friendzone if I heard women using it as often as men do. But I never, ever hear that. “I was so into this guy, we were getting along so well, and then I asked him out and he put me in the friendzone.”
I’m not saying that no woman ever has used it, but I’ve never heard it. It seems to be entirely a straight male thing. And it carries a lot of negative baggage. I agree that it’s basically synonymous with “rejected” because when most women reject a man, they want to remain friendly or cordial. And since it’s basically synonymous with rejection, it’s a negative word.
I’d also be more ok with it if more men used it positively. “I’ve known Sally for 15 years, always been in the friendzone and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” or even “I put Jane in the friendzone shortly after we met, and we’ve gotten along great ever since.”
Yet I never hear about men putting women in a friendzone. I never hear women saying that they put men in a friendzone. It’s always about men saying that women have put them in a friendzone. It’s always about what a woman has done to a man, from the man’s perspective.
I’ve never heard other gay men use it. Some gay guys, after being rejected, will be fine with being friends, and some aren’t… but I’ve never heard a gay guy say “oh he put me in the friendzone”
Until I start hearing it used positively, I’m never going to be able to take it seriously.
While I have my own objections to the use of the term “friendzoned,” I would also add that “rejected” is an inadequate term to use to describe this exchange, because it only covers half the chain of events.
Not saying that “friendzoned” is the right word, but I’m definitely saying that “rejected” isn’t, either.
I didn’t actually completely read the situation in this thread because it seemed kind of tedious. I was just commenting on the term friendzone.
I agree it’s overwhelmingly a straight male thing, but anecdotally one of my best friends specifically told me she “friendzoned” a woman she met and was irritated when the woman later expressed romantic interests.
They actually met on an online dating site, so it was particularly unusual that the woman specifically said she really only wanted to be friends. But my friend obliged and after a few weeks of explicitly agreed to friendship she wasn’t in the mood to change all of a sudden.
Anyway, point being, at least one time in history two lesbians were involved in a friendzone conflict.
I don’t see the confusion here. She’s not ready to get involved right now, but still wants to keep talking. You should keep “talking” to her, but also keep your options open for getting involved with someone else. The ball is in her court now, so stay friendly but don’t obsess on her-- get out and meet other women!
That’s not the scenario you described before:
You didn’t say anything at all about the feelings of these women, only that “you” (men) don’t find them sexually attractive. Perhaps you assume that because you’re not attracted to them they’re not attracted to you, but when women make this same assumption about men they like as friends but don’t want to date then they’re accused of playing manipulative games.
Well, like drewtwo99 I can’t remember ever hearing a woman complain about being “friendzoned”, nor can I recall a “friendzone” thread on the SDMB that was started by a woman. I’ve certainly heard women complain about being romantically rejected, but as far as I can tell it’s only (some) straight men who believe that others are cruelly and/or dishonestly placing them in an inescapable “zone” when someone they’re attracted to just wants to be friends.
(On preview I see that Fuzzy Dunlop has posted an anecdote about a lesbian friend who used the term “friendzone”, but she was referring to how she only wanted to be friends with the other woman. The woman whose romantic overtures were rejected did not, as far as we know, describe this as having been “put in the friendzone”.)
You don’t “hear it from women” because men rarely expect or insist that they remain social buddies after rejecting a woman’s overtures, if that happens fine, but it’s hardly an expectation the way it is with women rejecting men’s overtures. Men understand that there is likely to be a need for some space post–rejection. Women are usually (not always) more focused on maintaining interpersonal social connections than men are.
No one expects you to be friends with someone you don’t actually like as a friend. If a man doesn’t want to be friends with a woman then he’s free to not be friends with her. But in most of the “friendzone” complaints I’ve heard, the man was fine with acting like the woman’s friend until it became clear that this wasn’t going to lead to dating/sex. Men in this situation have only themselves to blame if a woman mistakes their friendship act for real friendship.
In fairness to the OP, it doesn’t sound like this was the case with him. He apparently was not hiding his intentions or pretending like he just wanted to be friends. But I don’t see any reason to believe, as he suggests, that the woman was being dishonest with him either. When he asked her out, which was apparently just a few days after they started socializing, she said she liked talking to him but wasn’t looking for a romantic relationship. If he doesn’t want to hang out with her as friends then she’ll probably be disappointed, but no one is going to force him to go through the motions of friendship if he’s not interested.
Back in my single days, my experiences often went like this:
-I’d start hanging out with a girl because she was part of my group of friends and was fun.
-We’d start talking more, due to common interests.
-I’d get a big old crush on her.
-I’d tell her (generally in some amazingly awkward and tremendously earnest and unattractive way) that I had a big old crush on her.
-She’d let me down, probably a little freaked out because I was really terrible at that sort of thing.
-I’d stay friends with her, because I thought it was important, and because I did value her friendship–but it’d be fairly awkward, and we’d never be as good friends as we’d been before.
I was never playing her. I was never pretending to be her friend just to get in her pants. Honestly, I would’ve been a lot better off if I’d been more straightforward about finding girls attractive back then. But if I could go back and give my youthful self advice, in addition to trying to convince young me that it was okay to be attracted to girls and that girls could find young me attractive, I’d also advise myself not to worry too much about an obligation to remain friends with someone who’d rejected me: it’s totally fine to spend less time around someone if it’s uncomfortable for you.