Before I dive into the topic of this article, I feel the need to clarify something. Although I will only be referring to "the friend zone” in the context of a friendship between a heterosexual man and heterosexual woman, I do not mean to suggest that it simply doesn’t apply to friendships between LGBT individuals.

That’s an entirely different issue and one that I am personally unable to address. I can only write about the friend zone from my own experience, and that happens to be in the context of a friendship between a heterosexual man and heterosexual woman. So let’s get to it.

Even if you’ve never personally experienced the friend zone, you’ve at least heard of it. A guy meets a girl and falls for her, but she “just wants to be friends.”

Heartbroken, the guy nevertheless resigns himself to this fate like the gentleman he is, while being forced to watch the girl he loves be mistreated and underappreciated by whoever she is in a romantic relationship with. Sounds like the typical plot from a teenage romance novel or movie, right? Unfortunately, if the friend zone was exclusive to teenage romance novels and movies, I wouldn’t have to write this article.

You see from middle school through the beginning of high school, I considered myself to be in the friend zone. I had developed romantic feelings for a close friend who I’d known for several years. I never told her how I felt, but I was certain that she didn’t feel the same way. Plus, she was already in a relationship.

So I buried my feelings and tried to be satisfied with just being her friend, while also hoping that one day, she’d see the “truth” and realize that no guy could care about her as much as I did. Talk about cringeworthy, right? The real problem with the friend zone, however, is not that reading or writing about it makes you cringe. The real problem with the friend zone is that it is an inherently misogynistic concept.

At the heart of what we call "the friend zone" is an expectation: if a guy is friends with a girl and has romantic feelings for her, she is somehow obligated to reciprocate those feelings. If she doesn’t reciprocate those feelings, the girl is considered heartless or inconsiderate. Now, of course, this is a ridiculous expectation for many reasons. Being friends with someone and having romantic feelings for them doesn’t automatically give you a free pass to their bedroom. Such an assumption rules out their own autonomy, and that’s not how romantic relationships work.

Of course, many guys claim to be in the friend zone because a girl gave them “mixed signals.” What qualifies as a mixed signal? Honestly, it could be anything from a hug that lasted longer than expected or an oddly placed winky face emoji in a text message. And while it is easy for a guy to read too much into a hug, certain characteristics of a text message can be genuinely difficult to decipher. But that is simply a consequence of communicating over text, not a sign that a girl is purposely misleading a guy who has romantic feelings for her.

In conclusion, the friend zone is really just a euphemism for the misogynistic belief that if a man befriends a woman and has romantic feelings for her, she is obligated to reciprocate those feelings because of her friendship with that man. Somehow, this misogynistic belief has become a trope in romance novels and movies, and it is considered heroic when a man “escapes” the friend zone.

But there is nothing “heroic” about a man forcing a false obligation onto a woman. Now I’m not saying that healthy relationships don’t blossom from genuine friendships, I’ve even experienced that in my own life. But there’s a stark difference between that and what we call the friend zone. And the sooner we make that distinction clear, the sooner we can get rid of the friend zone.