By Caroline Winter
This is an article about friendzoning, but not the kind you might expect. Certainly, not as it is usually discussed, where the rejected party is sympathised with, and the rejector receives a pitchfork and some devil horns. I decided I wanted to write a different kind of take on friendzoning.
Naturally, to help me, I began with a little research. I was utterly surprised to find there was very little being written, advocating for how damaging the friendzone can be for the person having to implement it. Annie Lord wrote about this for British Vogue, in an illuminating article that highlights why women never claim to have been friendzoned: because we don’t feel entitled to sex the way men do. Adding:
“It hurts when someone accuses you of friendzoning them because the insinuation is that your friendship isn’t worth very much at all. It tells women that their only value is that of a sexual object. “Did he even like hanging out with me or was he just waiting to make a move?...Does he feel like he’s wasted his time on me?”
And that’s exactly what I want to write about.
If you’ve recently been friendzoned, perhaps now is the time for you to leave. Clearly, this will not be a popular view.
After all, to friendzone someone is to potentially crush their hopes and dreams. Break their heart. Thrust them into the most ghastly of conditions: unrequited love.
And it’s true. I don’t at all mean to say that it isn’t terrible to open your heart and take the plunge, risking everything (most of all your friendship with someone) in the hopes of something more. It’s a noble thing to do, and I wouldn’t wish that sinking feeling of rejection on my worst enemy. Particularly from someone you have loved for a long time in secret, or who matters a lot to your life.
But equally, for a second, humour me.
Let’s take a look at things from a different stance. Not only is it a terrible thing to wound someone you love, rejecting them because you love them, just not like that. To see someone dear to you hurting because of something you did, even if it isn’t technically your fault, is devastating. It can plague you with guilt, and make you feel like a horrible person.
But there’s something more to it. I’d argue it can also be incredibly disillusioning.
To think that you had a mutual understanding with a person, only to discover you were on entirely different wavelengths. To realise that all along, you were looking at them in a certain way, and they were viewing you in a whole other manner entirely. That they wanted something more from you. That they were looking at your body lustfully, sexually, and not at all with the innocent affection you had previously believed.
It can feel like that man was never friends with you at all, but rather was simply waiting for the right moment to make their move. Friendzoning is almost entirely a male experience precisely because women are capable of accepting a rejection, whereas a lot of men aren’t. As the Harvard Crimson writes, friendzoning has nothing to do with friendship and everything to do with entitlement over women’s bodies.
As dramatic as this might sound, I stand by it. Particularly for women in heterosexual relationships, there can be this creeping feeling that friendship with a man is unrealistic. That sex and sexual tension will always alter dynamics, at least for the man involved. That you won’t be valued as a person without your body getting in the way. At its crudest, that if you don’t offer yourself as a sexual being, you are not enough in the eyes of a man who you once trusted and loved as a friend.
This idea is then reinforced by – in many cases – the wounded party retreating, and the friendship dying out. Of course, I am not saying that the rejected party simply fails to see worth in the other person now they have said the ultimate “no.” Realistically, people retreat because they are embarrassed, broken-hearted, or upset.
But from the perspective of the person who has said that fateful no, it can feel entirely different. It can feel as if their worth as a friend meant nothing to the other person, when to them it meant a lot. It can feel like a rejection, as twisted as the concept may seem.
It also creates hopelessness in the person who has done the rejecting. Friends and family tell you to leave the person alone, that it would be cruel to continue to hang out with them. Even worse, there is an assumption that you are “leading” someone on by continuing to interact with them after they’ve confessed their love. Simply because you want to maintain a friendship that has already begun to sink.
There is no winning. You have to leave. You have to lose someone you care deeply about. And you have to take all the blame.
It’s difficult on both sides of the equation, but in declaring your love for someone, you are the active participant. You decide to take a risk, knowing what the consequences might be. On the other hand, a person can decide to say yes or say no, but they are otherwise thrust into a helpless situation - they did not consent to have the friendship inevitably altered. The awkwardness and the pain. The drifting away. They get no say in any of it, but they nonetheless have to suffer the consequences, knowing that their friend is suffering too.
We need to stop villainizing people for expressing their pain at having to friendzone a person. It isn’t easy, and it can make it harder to trust friendships with the sexual orientation you are attracted to.
There is no devil and angel in this situation. Both parties get heartbroken; even if only one person does in the eyes of society. And in the end, the rejector must mourn a ruined friendship destroyed at their own, unwilling, hands.
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