How To Tell If You’re in The Friend Zone
Women stick around way too long.
I speculate this is likely due to country singers crooning the phrase, “Stand By Your Man” and watching the women in our life and Hollywood teach us that men are something to be coddled. So we bite our tongues, avoid words like “communication” and “feelings” and try not to rock the boat.
Listen ladies, stop waiting. That thing you’re in right now… it’s going nowhere. It stopped going anywhere a long time ago, likely because you broke lesson number 5 or didn’t define expectations, or he got bored after the chase gave him what he wanted, but he’s still sticking around because he either can’t say he’s not in the same place and would rather be friends or he’s slowly fading you out or a combination of both. Meanwhile, you’re spending valuable brain and heart space and your time (as well as your friend’s time) thinking and talking about what to do with the situation.
How To Tell If You’re In The Friend Zone
Knowing how to tell if you’re in the friend zone isn’t that hard; our guts already know. We’ve got mad skills like that. If you think back, you can likely home in on the exact moment that it happened, and holy shit, that moment was months ago. But if you’re still wondering if you may be in the friend zone or in some weird dating limbo, the most obvious sign is when his communication and planning, which was very orchestrated in the beginning, starts to drop off. Yet, you still hang around.
It’s time to go back to trusting and acting on our guts. When his Frank Sinatra serenade has turned into more of a Snoop Dog diddy, when things have shifted, when the pursuit has wained, it’s not because he’s a dick. No girlfriend. It’s just because he isn’t where you are at the time. Unfortunately, his mama/society/previous girlfriend’s/men in his life didn’t teach him how to tell you that, so instead he’s not going to take his part of responsibility for the situation as an adult and communicate this to you as it would be respectful to do so — and why should he when no one’s forcing him to? (It’s gotten so bad, they’ll just straight up ghost you.). Instead, he’ll just hope the problem goes away.
We know when it’s time to move on and we don’t want to listen to our gut because we don’t want to admit it. Admitting it means we failed, that we were not enough, that we didn’t play the game right. And if we stick around a little bit longer, change our tune, switch up our game, maybe he’ll fall for this awesome piece of milkshake that we know we are. Nope, sorry. Doesn’t happen that way. He’s already moved on, but he sure as heck won’t tell you that.*
So, lady girlfriend, next time you know you’ve been shifted into the non-girlfriend category, and trust me, you know, next time his consistent communication and chase turns into crickets, next time sex and intimacy starts to feel more like sex and less like intimacy, get executive on him, call it out and move on. He sure isn’t going to.**
*That’s a whole other piece of bs that I can’t wait to get sassy on in a future post, but this avoidance behavior has to stop and it starts with us.
**I don’t pardon the gals here who may do the same thing so the lesson applies for men who may be put in the friend zone with a woman they are dating. We’re all adults here, we should start acting like it.
