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.
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.