Many a poor guy has been relegated to the friendzone. Quite a few have been condemned to such a fate more than once, perhaps more often than not.
Well, at least I hope so, otherwise It'd just be me and Ryan Reynolds in that horrible movie with Amy Smart. The first time I saw that movie I was so deep in the zone that I thought they were saying my name the whole time. I've been there for as long as I can remember.
I could, theoretically, start this eligy of sadness when I was four years old, but do one's vague, prepubescent crushes really count? No. No they don't. We'd have to start on the first day of my 7th grade year. I get on the bus and the very first thing I see is this adorable Asian lady. Immediately, I was smitten, and after an hour long discussion about Blues Clues, I was totally locked in love. This turned into four years of anguish and love from afar, well, not physically afar since she sat two feet away from me on the bus everyday. We became friends pretty quickly. Not great friends. I was weird, and she was nice. Still, I like to say we were friends.
After three years of cowering affection, I asked her to go to homecoming with me our freshman year of highschool. To my great surprise and glee, she accepted. The picture on this article is of us at the dance. Yes, there are human beings out there that look as awkward as I did back then, and I was just as awkward as I looked.
Ultimately, I did not have the best time at this dance. We went to dinner with her friends and their dates, none of whom I knew, and I was constantly second guessing myself and her actual desire to be there with me. Frankly, my insecurities led to this being a pretty bad time for me and to me being a pretty sh*t date for her. I followed this up by avoiding her for a long time to spare myself the memories of a self-imposed purgatory. By the middle of the next year, I moved past my creepy, almost obsessive crush on her.
However, I immediately fell in love with another girl which may or may not still haunt me on occassion. This friendzone would be much, much deeper. I can't go into many details here, but she eventually became a very good friend of mine and still is.
This leads me to college, where this affliction has not left me. There is one example that really stands out to me. This time, I do not blame myself so much as luck.
This time, the girl was a friend of a friend. I dabbled with friendly conversation and the usual things that got me trapped in the zone, but I was actually able to get up the nerve to ask her out, given, I'm not altogether sure whether I made it clear that it was a real date as opposed to just a dinner between friends.
This didn't really matter to me.
I figured this could be a solid jumping off point for me into what I saw or, rather, envisioned as a beautiful relationship. Now, almost a year later, such has yet to develop. I blame, first and foremost, the mono that kicked into full effect three days before our planned second date/friendly dinner, which was to occur like three days before summer vacation, killing all of the meager momentum that I had pretended to build up earlier that semester.
Long story short, we went out to dinner once or twice the next fall, but I never really gained back the momentum I wish that I'd had the previous semester. We're friendly, but not romantic, which we never were, but I'd expected we would be by now.
Between her and my friend from high school, college has not been the sex-crazed experienced I always wanted it to be. Plus, I'm still haunted by my rampant insecurities that have more often than not been the probably underlying cause of the purgatorial torture of the friend zone.
