The friend zone. What is it actually? My best friend, Wikipedia, defines it as:
“A platonic relationship wherein one person wishes to enter into a romantic or sexual relationship, while the other does not. It is generally considered to be an undesirable or dreaded situation by the loverlorn person.”
Many have fought against the concept of the friend zone because it “devalues the very thing it references: friendship. Its view of sex suggests that platonic friendship is some sort of penalty box rather than a relationship someone should feel thankful for,” according to Planned Parenthoods Tumblr.
I am here to tell you that the friend zone does exist. It is real and it is very prevalent. I call the friend zone a hell on Earth. Before you immediately write me off as a misogynistic piece of trash, let me tell you why.
For the sake of the argument, I will be using a relationship in which a man is in love with his friend, a woman, who does not return his affection. Generally, a woman is aware of her friends feelings towards her. She knows any chance at a relationship, sexual or romantic, he will take it without hesitation. So what is the problem? It is how she tortures him. Yes, I used the word torture. No it is not an exaggeration.
She will talk to him about her love life, tell him about the joy and pain of sex with other men. She will lean on him for support specifically in the romantic area of her life. She knows that because of his feelings for her, there is nothing he will not do for her. Instead of having the conversation where she tells him nothing romantic will ever happen, she remains silent and lets him be her crutch. He will drive across state lines to pick her up from a party where she caught the guy she liked hooking up with someone else. He will bring her food at 2 am because in the midst of their conversation she said she was hungry. Because all he wants in the world is her, and she will continue to use that to her advantage. He is like the mythological Prometheus, having his liver torn out every day for nothing more than love, only worse because you a party to it.
More simply, what is the friend zone? A man in the friend zone is a boyfriend without the sexual benefits and the title. That is what is so wrong with it. It is because she will treat him as she would a boyfriend, without claiming him as such. It is the purposeful manipulation of one's emotions for their own personal benefit. Ironically the problem many see with F*ckboys. It is like the worst open relationship ever contrived.
The friend zone is real because we made it real. It is not simply a concept. I am fully aware that there are situations in which the misogynistic view has lead to violence against women. It is not the concept that created the violence; bad people with warped senses of masculinity create violence. The manipulation of a person’s emotion is what is wrong with the friend zone. Let's stop pretending it is just a social construct in the service of entitled men. The Friend Zone Exists, plain and simple.
