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Hey Dr. NerdLove,
I’ve been reading your column for a while and I’ve got a question that I don’t think I’ve seen you cover yet. You’ve written a lot about The Friend Zone (yes, I know, I read that part too) but not what you do after you shoot your shot and miss.
OK here’s the deal. I’ve been close friends with “Sarah” (names changed to protect the innocent) for about a couple years now. We met during our first year of college, and our friendship has been nothing short of amazing. We were friends pretty much instantly, spent almost all of college being completely inseparable and we are so in tune with one another in terms of what we like and what we’re into that it’s like we’ve known each other all our lives. We’re closer than family and she’s incredibly important to me and until now I’d say the feeling was mutual. Honestly, I can’t imagine my life without her.
As time has rolled on, my feelings for Sarah have evolved into something deeper. So, with a combination of nerves and excitement, I decided to lay my cards on the table, tell her how I felt and asked her out on a date. Sarah was kind about it, but she told me she didn’t feel the same way and valued our friendship too much to change its nature.
And thus, I’ve landed square in the midst of the dreaded friend zone.
I’m doing my best to not let this change things for us, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t really hurt, and a part of me that I really don’t like that is kind of angry about it. I don’t even know if I’m angry at her or at me or just angry. I’m doing my best to ignore that part and there’s the part of me that can’t help but feel a mix of rejection and sadness and the rest of me trying to act like nothing is different. But I don’t know if I’m doing a good job keeping this to myself and managing these emotions while trying to maintain our friendship is proving to be a complex dance.
Since then, things have felt weird and off. I don’t know if it’s real or it’s just me overthinking things and reading into stuff that isn’t there. That’s not helping with my wanting to move forward and I’m worried that maybe I did everything wrong and ruined things. And then there’s the rest of me that worries that maybe I’m not holding my anger or frustration back enough and she thinks I was just doing the nice guy thing and was never really her friend.
So here I am, reaching out to you to ask: how do I navigate this situation? How can I handle my feelings of rejection while continuing to be a good friend to Sarah? Should I take some distance to heal or is there a way to adjust my expectations and feelings while still being close?
Your insights would mean the world right now.
Looking For A Compass In the Friend Zone
That’s rough, LFCFZ. It always sucks when you put yourself out there like that over someone you care about and find out that they don’t feel the same way. You should give yourself some credit for actually having the courage to try, as well as not just doing the standard feelings-dump. I’m a big believer that it’s much better to ask someone on a date, rather than just drop your feelings in their lap and ask them to do something with it. A date, at least, would mean they have something to say “yes” to that isn’t “ok and now we’re a couple”; at the very least, it’s an opportunity to see if what you have is going to transition into more than just platonic affection.
But as the sage says, it’s possible to commit no errors and still lose. That’s just life. It sucks, to be sure, but it’s just how things are. The only thing you can really do is accept it and look to the future instead of dwelling on the past.
The problem is, as you’re discovering, getting through the present.
So, I’ll tell you what’s likely going on and what to do about all of this, but first things first, let me give you this: if you two were as tight as you say and as close as family, then this isn’t going to “ruin” things. Take a deep breath and trust in your friendship. Things may feel a little strained – which doesn’t mean that they are strained – but if you two are that tight, then you should be able to weather this particular storm and come through on the other side.
Right now, however, you’ve got some stuff to process while you wait. And you’re going to need to process it on your own.
Now, I’ve been there and done this more times than I care to count, so I know damn good and well what you’re doing. But hey, that also means I know what you should do, so you don’t make the same dumbass mistakes I did and prolong things to the point of absurdity.
You’re making a classic mistake of trying to pretend you’re not hurting and that you’re not angry because you don’t feel like you have the “right” to be angry about this. And that’s not strictly true. You feel the way that you feel. Your feelings are real, and that includes the anger you’re feeling and it’s ok to feel it. It’s not necessarily fair to be angry at her – she didn’t do anything wrong – but feeling angry is understandable. It’s just the part of you that’s in pain and looking for a place to put those feelings. You aren’t more mature or sensible or whatever for trying to force yourself to not feel.
Now notice that I said it’s not fair to be angry at her. You are almost certainly feeling it anyway, and feeling guilty about it. That’s understandable and that’s natural. The key is to recognize that your feeling angry at her doesn’t mean she did anything wrong here. She didn’t not-fall-in-love at you or lead you on or trick you. It’s not even that she doesn’t love you; she may not love you the way that you’d wish, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t love you a lot or as best she can. So while you feel angry at her, you don’t want to blame her or take it out on her or otherwise make it her problem. These are your feelings, after all.
But those feelings aren’t going to go away just because you’re trying to not feel them or that you feel bad about feeling them. Trying to push it all down just compresses them, makes them more intense and more likely to leak out the sides and through the cracks. The same with the sadness, the fear and all the rest.
The key is what you do with them and how you express them. So the first thing I would suggest is giving yourself permission to go some place and just let it out. Go out some place and just scream for a second. It doesn’t need to be anything other than just pure emotion as sound, letting out the pressure that’s built up over all of this. Let yourself feel it, name it and pay attention to it. What is the shape and texture of that feeling? Where are you feeling it? What does it feel like? As you feel it and name it and express it out into the night air… just let it evaporate. Then take a walk and give yourself time to cool down. If you’re going to ugly-cry, then do that while you walk. Let the tears flow; it’s how you clean the wound and jumpstart the healing. Then, as the tears dry and you feel a little numb and empty (which will happen faster than you expect), give yourself some forgiveness. You did a brave thing and it didn’t work out and that’s ok. You’re allowed to feel sad and hurt about it. It’s the fact that you’re trying to pretend that you don’t feel it that’s causing you most of these problems.
It’s almost certainly obvious to everyone around you that you’re hurting, and even more obvious to Sarah that she’s the proximate cause. It’s not her fault, to be sure. But knowing that you’re hurting and she’s why is likely making things awkward. And if she cares for you like you say – and we have no reason to believe otherwise – then she doesn’t want to make you feel worse. So it’s likely that she’s keeping her distance, partially because it’s awkward now, but mostly because she doesn’t want to make you hurt any more than you already do.
Giving yourself a little time to feel the fuck out of your feels is a good idea. Doing so away from Sarah is also good. These are your feelings and she doesn’t need to manage them for you, and any desire to try to help or reassure you likely isn’t going to be helpful at this moment. But a little time doesn’t mean forever. Hell, it doesn’t even mean very long; just long enough to let things pass and get to the acceptance stage of it all.
What I would suggest is to tell her that you need a little bit to deal with this – that you want to give yourself some time to just process and have a sad and you’ll be back soon and this won’t be a big deal. Give yourself a week to wallow and then a week to work on getting back on your feet by giving yourself other things to focus on. Work, exercise, even just giving your dorm room a major cleaning – things that will occupy your body let you just zone out a bit, so you don’t have to think. If you do think and you experience those painful thoughts, just note them, name them – “that’s my anxiety that I may lose my friendship with Sarah” – and gently redirect your attention to something else. The feelings will pass if you let them, instead of trying to ignore them or dwell on them obsessively.
Then, when you’re ready, hit up Sarah and ask her to come do something that you’d normally do. Grab lunch, hang out on the quad and read, whatever; let things go back to normal. That doesn’t mean pretend that nothing happened, just that it didn’t damage your friendship or change it for the worse. This was a thing, it was weird for a bit but the two of you have powered through it like adults and you’re back to being friends again.
Because here’s the thing: if you really are her friend and she really is yours, then this is just an uncomfortable moment. It would take a lot more to damage the friendship than this. If you were to make your feelings her problem, have a tantrum whenever she starts so much as glancing at another guy or every aspect of your friendship about why she doesn’t want you or whatever… that would damage things. But just saying “hey, I have feelings for you”? The only way that would ruin things is if you were lying about being her friend in the first place.
Now that being said: while I wouldn’t tell you to avoid the topic, I don’t think talking it out is going to be a good idea just yet. Giving yourself time to move on is going to be important, especially since you’re going to be raw for a bit. It’s not going to do you any good to try to talk about this when it’s going to feel like sandpaper to your soul. I understand the impulse to want to get it out in the open and over with as soon as possible, I really do. But there’s necessary discomfort and unnecessary discomfort, and right now I think you’d be doing more harm to yourself than good. Think of it like rehabbing a torn muscle; just because it’s not hurting as much doesn’t mean that you’re ready to leap back into the race just yet. You need to give it time to heal the rest of the way, so you don’t re-injure yourself.
But a time will come – sooner than you might expect – when you and she are both going to be ready and able to discuss it without fear of it hurting or reopening the wound. And that’s when you’ll know for sure that while things didn’t work out the way you hoped at the time… it worked out for the best. For the both of you.
Good luck.
Hi Doc,
Long (and I mean LONG, at least ten years) time reader, first-time asker here.
My problem has less to do with my lack of success in dating and romance, though I do have that. It’s more to do with my sexuality as a whole, and whether it’s ultimately holding me back, or even harmful.
I’m a cishet white guy, almost 30, normal-looking, not impoverished but not rich either, and I have what you might describe as a sophomoric libido, which I find kind of embarrassing.
I’ve had two very brief relationships and a single one-night-stand where I couldn’t even get it up, and consequently I fantasize about being in exactly the opposite situation – having lots of sex with lots of conventionally-attractive young women.
I am very much aware that our entire culture has been oriented entirely towards people like me to the exclusion of anyone else for a very long time. But when I read a pulpy horror or fantasy novel by a male author and he starts describing a female character’s body in leery detail (the sort of thing you’d see on r/menwritingwomen), while I recognize it as being something that might make someone who isn’t a straight man uncomfortable, I cannot deny that I ENJOY reading passages like that, to the degree that I actively seek books of that sort out. The result is that I make myself feel ashamed and titillated at the same time on a pretty regular basis.
The same goes for sexualized designs for female characters in video games, heaving-corseted heroines in 70s exploitation movies, and so on. I LIKE seeing these objectified images, and it makes me feel bad, since I know that culture is deliberately trying to move past that sort of thing to make the media landscape more friendly to people who aren’t… well, me. So bad I worry that it might come across as off-putting should any potential future partners or platonic female friends find out about it.
I recently read bell hooks’s book “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love” (not a flex, it made me feel bad and I didn’t enjoy the experience) and I couldn’t deny that I saw myself in her description of toxic masculine love/lust, and not at all in her vision of a more egalitarian romantic love between men and women.
Is it possible for me to reconcile the fact that I know women are basically the same as men when you get down to it, just people, and the objectifying fantasies I have about them? Do I need to retool my sexuality entirely in order to make myself datable, let alone the good person I want to be in general?
-The Male Gaze
OK MG, I say this as someone who has written a LOT about toxic masculinity, the objectification and sexualization of women and trying to be a grown-ass man in the 21st century: put the bell hooks down and back away slowly.
Seriously my dude, you sound a 4channer trying to write a Male Feminist letter for shits and giggles. You are overthinking and overanalyzing to the point of absurdity, looking inward so hard that you basically turned yourself into a human klein bottle.
Here’s the thing: fantasies are just that: fantasies. Getting turned on by stuff, even the stuff that feels like “fire-bad-tree-pretty” caveman level of sexuality is fine. If you love some breasty women boobily boobing down the stairs in your fiction, that’s nobody’s business but you and your Amazon wish list. If movies and stories about dames with fishnet-clad legs that go on forever and curves like a stretch of bad road are what get your motor humming, then by all means, down a couple slugs of cheap rotgut and see what that femme fatale has to say for herself. Because hey, what turns you on is what turns you on. Nobody is expecting you to get cranked up over someone lounging around in an outfit that emphasizes her doctorate in theoretical physics or who accessorized her lingerie with the Fields Medal while reading Proust aloud and that’s fine. Nobody’s grading you on what you jerk it to.
Unless that’s what you’re looking for, anyway. I understand there’re folks on OnlyFans who’ll do that for you.
I hate to break it to you, my dude, but this isn’t exactly a deep dark secret that you’re carrying around. Having a thing for 70s era Playboy spreads or dodgy pulps with titles like Lesbian Librarians In Heat isn’t really going to shock or horrify anyone, any more than admitting that you visit PornHub. It’s pretty bog standard, honestly. Some might think it’s a bit immature if that’s all you consume, but getting a thrill from stuff that doesn’t have the Straw Feminist Seal Of Approval isn’t going to get you much worse than a roll of the eyes from anyone.
And really, that’s only if you go out of your way to tell them.
Part of what I think you’re missing is that the issue with a lot of the media you’re talking about is that for a long time, it was the only thing out there. The objectification and sexualization of everyone was constant, the minimization of women to sex-object was everywhere and it was treated as right and good and if you had a problem with it, then you were a scold and a frigid funwrecker.
But as society recognized that hey, the way we’ve been acting is kinda fucked up and making everything about this very narrow vision of compulsory heterosexuality was even more fucked up and we’ve broadened our horizons. There’s more material out there that aims to cater to a wider array of gazes, tastes and desires – from the chaste to the depraved, from the buttoned up to the jaw-drop-wolf-whistle-lip-bite and points in between… for all genders and sexualities.
It’s not like the point of the Bechdel Test or the Mako Mori test or the Sexy Lamp Test are markers of whether media is acceptable or not; after all, “Baby Got Back” passes the Bechdel Test. The whole point of them – as well as a host of media criticism about the marketing and selling of sexuality and masculinity – is to ask people to think a little about the media they’re making and consuming and remember that women are people too.
It’s also worth remembering that women, like men and enbies, aren’t just people, they’re also pieces of meat who occasionally want to be objectified. Not all the time, not by default and not by everyone, but it has its time and place and person. And sometimes that objectification is going to be happening strictly between your ears during some private time, and what goes on there is nobody’s business but yours.
Now, I suspect that the embarrassment and shame is part of the pleasure of it all. Shame and arousal are close cousins and there’re few things quite as arousing as the taboo. Feeling like what you’re doing makes you a naughty naughty boy may give everything an extra bit of spice. But honestly, nobody you meet who isn’t a Victorian time-traveler is going to be surprised that you get a semi for boobs and butts. Some might judge you, but honestly, most of what you describe is kind of basic. You’re hardly reading The Story of O, spanking it to Salo or touching yourself to 100 Days of Sodom, here.
And the Victorians, I might point out, were kinky as shit behind closed doors. Some of the books that were published during the height of memetic prudery would make you pop your monocle.
And hey, maybe it would do you some good to explore a little of what women read and watch to get turned on. The varieties of smut out there for women are wide and varied, and some of it is just fuckin’ weird. There’s a reason why monsterfucker is a genre now. Fun fact: women tend to be more into tentacle porn than men.
The fact of the matter is that people fantasize, watch, read and masturbate to things that they would never do in real life, even things that would seem antithetical to their lived values. Because it’s not something they want to do in the real world, it just happens to be a thing that turns them on and gets them off. They just compartmentalize and recognize that fantasies are just that: fantasies. In phantasia veritas, except sometimes the truth is just “yeah, it makes me orgasm extra hard.”
Now the bigger question would be: the more objectifying stuff is what you jerk it to, but how are you treating the women in your life? Are you doing your best to be as equitable as possible and behaving as though the women you interact with as human beings? If you’re not acting as though women are sexual objects who are just there to be consumed, I think you’re going to be ok. Because, quite frankly, that’s going to mean a lot more to your friends and potential future partners than what’s in your spank-bank.
Feel free to keep on enjoying some Russ Meyer films. Just, y’know. Don’t make ‘em your whole personality.
Good luck.
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