So, last night I asked a woman to the theater with me. My intentions were for it to be a date, complete with walking her home and possibly kissing her goodnight if the chemistry was right. We know each other through school, so I wasn’t approaching her cold. Actually, she’s been flirtatious with me for the past couple of weeks. When I asked her out she asked whether this was “going out” or if I just wanted to go to the theater with her. I was candid and said it was a date. She said she didn’t want to. So, my question is which is better in these situations: to acknowledge that it’s a date from the start, or to say it’s just spending time together.
On the one hand, I can see that saying it’s a date has a lot of stress attached to it. On the other hand, I don’t want to end up in the friend zone, so being candid about what I’m interested in seems like a good idea. Of course, part of the problem is I cannot tell the difference between “dating” and “going places together.” It seems to be the same thing regardless of the label.
To keep things on-topic, I’m not trying to figure out what went wrong or get inside her head. I’m just interested in whether contextualizing a date as a date is a good idea in this day and age.
No, you answered the question exactly right. If you’re interested in dating someone, don’t pretend you’re not. You don’t have to explicitly ask her on “a date”, but be clear that it will just be the two of you. What you did was just perfect, IMO. You just got shot down. No biggie – leave a few drunken posts on her Facebook calling her a whore and move on.
Hell if I know. Last week I went on what I thought was a date, only to be told when I put my arm around her, “You know this is just as friends, right.” Some of my female friends (the real kind, not the kind I want to date) told me that this isn’t necessarily a brush off, which I had assumed it to be. Apparently women don’t regard friendship and dating as strict, never-to-be-breached categories, so “This is just as friends,” doesn’t really mean more than “I don’t want to make out with you tonight.” Or something like that.
Jesus Christ, I’m way too old not to have this stuff figured out by now.
The only appropriate response to that is “that’s fine, as long we’re still having sex later.”
But no, your female friends are wrong, that’s a brush-off. Some women will hook up with their friends now and again, so they don’t think of friends as 100% off limits, but no woman ever tells a guy she’s interested in physically and/or romantically that their outing is “just as friends” as a response to him trying to make a move.
I think it would be okay to say something like, “We don’t have to put a label on it. Let’s just spend some time together and see where it goes.” That way you’re not exiling yourself to the friend zone or pressuring her with the word date.
This is why I still can’t figure out these signals. Every time I have someone tell me what they mean I get lots of completely different responses. The two women who told me it isn’t a brush off aren’t young women with college kids’ ideas of relationships and sex. One is married and about thirty and one is probably in her fifties. But they were both adamant that there is no “friend zone.” That’s the same thing a good friend told me when she explained how she and her boyfriend got together after she rejected him saying that she just wanted to be friends. But it is exactly opposite my experience, in which I’ve pretty clearly gotten myself stuck in the “friend zone,” and also what lots of other people have told me.
See, I don’t think they’re talking at cross purposes there. As far as I’m concerned, Giraffe is right. If I liked a guy I’d never tell him our outing was just friends, because that’s insanely counter-productive. But Alice wasn’t giving the opposite advice, she was suggesting a way that the OP could in the specific case of the lady obviously acting skitterish about calling it a date could give the woman space without agreeing that it was a “just friends” situation. I don’t see that working very well since it seems as likely to scare an unintrested girl off, but it’s not contradicting what Griaffe said, just coming at things from a different angle.
I think the key to understanding the Friend Zone is that it doesn’t mean that no one ever dates or hooks up with people who they were at first just friends with. It means that, upon getting to know someone, your chances of dating them are dramatically higher if you start out trying to date them, rather than adopting a platonic stance at first and later trying to transform the relationship into a romantic one.
Now, for some pairs of people, it’s irrelevant – you have a 0.0% chance of dating no matter how you approach it. And a small fraction of time, being friends first actually increases the chances of a romantic relationship, as one becomes attracted to things they may not have noticed initially. But the vast majority of the time, having an initial platonic relationship torpedoes any chance at romance. This is what’s known as the Friend Zone.
If it’s any consolation, a lot of people who end up in the Friend Zone never had any chance at romance with the person they’re interested in – the Friend Zone is a convenient place to stick suitors you’re not attracted to so you don’t feel like a bad person.
Also, I like Alice the Goon’s suggested wording very much. It makes your intentions known, but minimizes skittishness. Probably won’t help if they’re not into you, but it certainly won’t hurt.
Bingo. There really is no such thing as the “friend zone”. There are “people I’m interested in sleeping with” and “people I’m not interested in sleeping with”. There is also, of course, the ever-popular “people I’m interested in sleeping with but refrain from it for any number of reasons”, but I can’t think of a single instance in which the reason was that I “just couldn’t bear the idea of screwing up our friendship”. That is absolutely and unequivocally code for “I like you, but I don’t LIKE you like you.”
Giraffe is correct. The lady friends are patronizing you, and trying to soothe your feelings. They, being ‘kind,’ don’t understand how destructive this kind of bad information is. You are clearly on the search, and since they are married, or whatever, don’t have to invest much in facts; so idle speculation, at your expense, does not cost them as much as it does you, and it can provide them with much amusement.
Suppose you have a friend and that you know (for whatever reason) that you would not be interested in a relationship with him/her. An instance comes along in which you feel the urge to have sex with your friend but you refrain because you know that the friend will be hurt afterwards due to you not wanting a relationship and things will inevitably become awkward between the two of you.
Isn’t that a case (and not all that uncommon) of not sleeping with somebody because you cant bear the idea of screwing up your friendship?
No, it’s an instance of not sleeping with someone I’m not interested in sleeping with (at least regularly). It’s simply not indulging a momentary urge that doesn’t change the fact that “I like you, but I don’t LIKE you like you.”
