Wendy posted these poignant personal stories about growing up and the so called “friendzone”. This post goes well with The Friendzone Explained if you’d like to read more about the topic.
Source: Wendy
The ending of this story is a good reminder that Both Men and Women Experience Rejection. Do you have any similar stories about being girlfriendzoned and losing your male friends, or vice versa? Let us know in the comments below!
I’m going to help you ladies out, ALL GUYS THINK ABOUT HAVING SEX WITH YOU! Now the problem is how do they respond when they are told no, some with weak egos cant handle it and go all Dexter, some just find a girl that will have sex with them and spend all their time with her, not that they don’t still like you, but they would rather spend their time getting laid. So in the future, when I a guy starts getting all googly eyed or starts giving you gifts and taking you out, he is already envisioning sex and if you are not interested you should make it clear there and then, the longer you wait the angrier he is going to be when you finally say no.
Just my two cents.
That’s why I don’t have any guy friends, besides gay ones. If you don’t want to have a bond with me that isn’t sexual, I’m not interested. I don’t have time to waste with superficial friendships because you only value people you bang, lol.
I disagree, only because twice I’ve gotten to a point with my guy besties where they honestly weren’t interested in sex anymore. In my experience, you need to stay friends long enough to get past their desire for you, and then your desire for them (we kinda went back and forth for a while), and once both of you have kinda lost the secual desire, you are THE BEST of friends. It feels like family. I’ve been lucky enough to experience two very best friends in this way. I’m still friends with one of them, and we see each other regularly. The other one moved to Spain and got married years ago.
Following advice like this is where you get girls who say “I have a boyfriend!” when you give them back the hat that they dropped.
Hot take: this reads like the author is autistic and doesn’t know it. Let’s assume, for the purposes of this comment, that this is true (it may not be). She is really smart and got good at masking from a young age to adjust to the pressure to conform to social norms, which is placed much more strictly on girls than on boys—and from a very young age.
The only people who don’t intuit her in person as “off” are other neurodivergent folks, and these boys who probably also don’t know about themselves follow portrayals from media, etc., about the workings of interpersonal relationships. They bond over special interests, as one does, and here’s the thing. The classic portrayal of autistic people as unfeeling is straight up bullshit. Of these boys, the ones that hurt her the worst are the autistic ones—they feel HARD.
Unfortunately, even if they were diagnosed, the medical community (and especially insurers) eschews the useful in favor of literal torture in the form of Applied Behavioral Analysis.
So these boys don’t learn effective coping and communication skills for dealing with this. They have to eventually come upon it themselves. And for each, if ever, it was after these stories. Hence the craptacular behavior.
This is not to excuse harmful behavior. I don’t have perfect answers. Better childhood interventions can go a long way, if they aren’t ABA. But neither the author nor the other kids had a shot of navigating this by the seats of their respective pants.
I’m female. I’ve done this to guys. Wanting to be wanted physically is not just a thing boys do to girls.
You’re right, it sucks for these boys too if you abandoned them or hit them after they told you they didn’t want more. Regardless of genders, getting angry over someone saying no to having sex with you or dating you is awful.
“put yourself in the shoes of a girl who thought she made a wonderful friend, only to find out that he just wanted her for sex.”
How sad.
Pathetic, even.
How absurdly petty, to think that because a boy wants to add physicality to their relationship with their best friend, that boy must want them *only* for sex.
“Hey, like, we’ve climbed trees together, learned to ride bikes together, read comics together, played video games together, been best of friends, spending enormous amounts of time doing pretty much *nothing* together… for years. You’re my best friend, and I’m yours. Wanna try this ‘sex’ thing, see what the excitement is all about?”
“You absolute cad, you monster, you heel. ALL YOU WANT IS SEX.”
I love how a point was made and there are people still twisting it to fit their narrative or miss it completely.
Right? Trying to make the post about the girl saying no, completely leaving out how, in EVERY case, the boy abandoned her. By getting mad and physically abusing her, ignoring her boundaries, emotionally abusing her, or trying to gaslight her. Hey, WeWereBesties, she did not once call any of the boys a cad for wanting more. She pointed out how they hurt her when she said no.
Yes, but all but one did not attack her.
Kyle stopped being her friend after it became clear that their ideas of friendship were different.
Rich and Joseph attacked each other.
Zach stopped being her friend apparently in response to social factors, but there is no mention of his attacking her.
Colour boy was a disk.
Ryan wanted more than friendship, exhibited jealousy towards her boyfriends and expressed his disappointment when she said she was lesbian. There was a misunderstanding there by both parties, but no mention of any attack.
The boy who sang to her obviously wanted a sexual relationship. He should have stopped trying earlier, but again there is no mention of any attack.
Dakota also obviously wanted a sexual relationship and should have stopped trying earlier, but he didn’t do anything so bad that she didn’t want to be friends with him.
If she thought that she had just made a good friend with a boy without sex having been discussed she was being naive. Their stopping being friends with her is almost certainly not an attack on her. It is more likely that they are spending their time trying to befriend some other girl who they think might have sex with them, and likely they expect her to understand that.
So you are arguing that it is normal and to be expected that nobody will actually want to be your friend because your friendship without sex is worthless? And yet you claim this is not an attack on her, this saying that her friendship – the part that you need an actual living, breathing and feeling being for – is worthless unless she also plays blow-up-doll for them?
Wow, you missed the point completely. ALL of the boys stopped being friends with her because she wouldn’t be their girlfriends. They didn’t want a friend, they wanted a girlfriend.
I had a best friend who lived an hour away from me when I was 16. We wrote letters back and forth (yes this was before computers) and I have a pile of hundreds of letters from him still. When we hung out we laughed and laughed. We planned a concert one time, and I carefully asked him if I could bring the guy I was dating. He said yes and I said, “are you SURE”? He insisted it was fine. I brought my boyfriend and we made out to some of the songs. I thought all three of us were having a great time. I never heard from my best friend again.
Thank you for this article.
Wow. Guys get interested in the girls they spend time with. What a shocker. Groundbreaking. Seems more like her real orientation constantly got in the way on some subconscious level, making her adverse to actually dating guys, and souring up the experience when they do try. I mean, there are better ways of handling that than name-calling or abandoning someone, but you cannot be shocked, or even get angry, when a natural thing – literally a thing of nature – happens with the opposite sex interaction. Thats ridiculous.
True, but the whole freaking post was about how the males handled that rejection. If they had just accepted that she wasn’t interested in them that way that would have been better by several magnitudes of whatever scale is used. The next step would be to let go of any anger at that situation/clarification of the relationship and decided to just be her friend instead of what they DID do. Which was to attack her physically, verbally, emotionally (and not in this case I hope but sexually as well in other cases) and then leave.
That’s what the problem is here and has been in pretty much every friend-zone story ever. That’s what OP described as happening with her (Junior High?) crush. She shared her feelings, the other person acknowledged that but didn’t return those feelings. So OP decided she’d rather have them in her life as a friend instead of freaking out, getting mad, and affirming that OP wanted nothing to do with that person and their suddenly revealed toxicity.
It’s real easy to do this folks. Accept people’s decisions/declarations of whatever they care to share with you. Even if that is to just be their friend and there’s no hope at all for that to ever change.
“when i told him no a couple hundred times, he found new girls to listen to”
There’s no abuse there by the guy. That is just the writer being upset that they’re losing a “friend” because that friend was interested in a sexual relationship and OP wasn’t. OP feels entitled to all the attention that she wants and needs from these boys, but then is upset that these boys then want attention back in the most natural and biological way possible, via physical intimacy.
This girl wants her cake and to eat it too. She wants all these boys to be her boyfriend, but not get the sex out of it. She lets them take her to movies. She lets her sing them songs, sitting on her bed. She is obviously and intentionally inviting these boys into her life, knowing exactly what they want and what their intentions are.
While there is zero excuse for abuse or violence of any kind, that isn’t really OP’s point here. Her point is about the “friendzone” relationship she has with all these boys, and how she “loses” their friendship. She never had their friendship. They were never friends. It was a blossoming relationship the boys were seeking. Which she allowed, up until the point she didn’t.
Men are not friends with women that they find attractive. If you’re a girl or woman and you think you have a male friend, there are exactly 3 options: 1) He wants to sleep with you, no matter what he says or what you think, 2) He doesn’t want to sleep with you, because he’s gay, 3) He doesn’t want to sleep with you because he finds you unattractive in some way, physically or otherwise. Women hate to hear that. Sorry. I promise you it’s true. If you don’t believe it and are tempted to give me your example … it’s going to fit into #1.
She did not want to have her cake and eat it. she thought she had friends, but what she had was, as you say, a guy who wanted to sleep with her. She didn’t have a boyfriend minus sex. she had a friend. All those things, like sitting on the bed talking and going to movies? She would do that with a female friend just as readily.
Men are not friends with women in the way women are friends with women. Men think emotional outlet females are either their mother or their girlfriend. Women think emotional outlets are friends or family, regardless of gender. If a woman then treats a guy as a friend, listening to their problems, comforting them when things go bad, being there for them as a friend, or talking about her own emotional issues, the guy gets the idea that she is the emotional outlet female. That means the woman can then be approached for romantic interactions, in their mind. They feel like they have been “led on” when they are told “no”, like she has been doing everything just to toy with his feelings.
How many times do you think someone has to say “no”? I know media has the whole “persist and she will change her mind” storyline, but real life is not like that. If you persist, you become someone to be avoided.
The reason for that? When asked what the worst fear is about the opposite sex, men said that women would laugh at them. Women said that men would kill them. Men who get told no are unpredictable. Losing someone you thought was a best friend because you won’t sleep with him is hard, because you wonder if he really was a friend in the first place, or if he was just there hoping to get laid. It hurts when you consider that your only value to someone you care about as if they were family is what’s in your underwear.
As for your comment number 3- men who are spurned will call women fat, or ugly, or tell them they were just joking, because”nobody would want to sleep with someone like you”, or “I’m the best you can get. No one else is going to touch you”. Men who don’t find women attractive in some way won’t even bother trying to be friends, never mind romantic partners, because attraction is more than just skin deep.
Go on- I dare you to contradict anything here.
You’re right when you say that a lot of these friendships were suspicious. This guy should not have been asking her hundreds of times for romance. And she probably should have found a way to set better boundaries.
But I want to push back on this trope that men can’t be true friends with women.
I’m a man, straight, late thirties. Since I was in my late teens most of my friends have been women.
Many of them were attractive to me. Some of them i fell for some I didn’t. Some I had vague fantasies about but didn’t actually want to date. Some were like sisters and it would have been too weird. Some of them I confessed feelings for, and then let those feelings go (in time) after they said no. We continued our friendship.
Now decades later, I still have a lot of those friends. They are still attractive. I don’t “want to sleep with them”. My body can have a vague interest in sex without my mind being on board. These women are so much more important to me than by libido. They are family.
There have been times when one of them offered sex and I turned them down, despite being tempted, because our friendship was far more valuable than a roll in the hay.
I don’t deny that a lot of guys would prioritize sex, but I also know at least several guys who wouldn’t.
I’m personally of the opinion that the reason her friends are abandoning her isn’t because of basic biology but because of tropes like this that tell men “in order to be a successful, real man, you’ve gotta sleep with women whenever you can”.
That message leads men to feel personally attacked of a woman rejects sex.
Dude, some of my friends turned me down and went on to become some of the kindest, most supportive, fun people in my life. That’s basically the opposite of a personal attack, but a man prioritizing sex and romance wouldn’t be able to perceive that. To me that’s a true loss.
Men and their comments, disgusting and entitled as always.