Friendzone

            These half-formed thoughts have been falling from my head with remarkable speed recently.  In this case, the post discusses the “friend-zone,” in which boys (or girls, for that matter) have romantic feelings refused by a close friend who nonetheless wish to retain their friendship.  I’ve been on both ends of this stick in the past two years, so I’ve got some idea of how it feels.  It’s not comfortable, and from the receiving end, it feels like rejection.

            After some thought and experience, I came to a somewhat odd conclusion.  Friendship and romantic feelings are two very different things, and though not mutually exclusive, they most certainly are not married.  I care deeply about many people in my life, but I have romantic feelings for very few of them.  That I would reject overtures from the others most emphatically does not mean that I value them less; in fact, I would argue that an honest rejection would be the clearest sign that I value them.

            Now we come to the punchline of this post; I argue that being “friendzoned,” as it were, actually shows that the other person values you too much to lie to you.  It’s easy to lie, especially if you think you’ll get something from it.  Yet, to lie to another person may be the quickest way to destroy the bonds of trust between people.  It says that you do not value that person enough to give them the truth and that you don’t trust him or her to be able to handle it.  It’s insulting, and it’s wrong.

I say, far better to tell the truth at the beginning.  The surgeon’s knife and the hot iron offer the best chance at healing.  The knife must cut to remove the barb, and the iron must burn to seal the wound, but to leave the barb be invites creeping infection.  Infection may lessen the pain, but as it kills the pain it kills the host.  If nothing else, the surgery’s pain means you can still feel; if nothing else, it means you are still alive.

Lest you all think I’m merely proselytizing, I can tell you that I’ve had precisely this debate with myself in the recent past.  A few years ago close friend of mine asked me if I wanted to start a romantic relationship with her.  I’ll admit, the question did not entirely take me blind; I’d been asking myself the same question.  Still, I didn’t have an answer.

After mulling the question over for a couple of days, I came to the same argument that I outlined above.  I didn’t want to hurt her; she was my closest friend at the University at that time, and remains one of my closest.  Driving her away was the last thing I wanted, but I knew that the spark, the emotional drive simply wasn’t there.  Given that fact, I decided that I should tell her that I wanted to keep our friendship, but that a romantic relationship simply wouldn’t work.

This was not an easy decision.  Personally, I take rejection hard, and it takes great effort for me to make myself so vulnerable.  As such, I knew that the rejection would hurt, for I had to strike her hard.  Nonetheless, I knew that pretending to have feelings that didn’t exist would hurt even more.  She wouldn’t have been fooled for long, and when she discovered the truth it would be two injuries in one.  I cared about her too much to cause more harm than necessary.

When I met her to tell her this, she took the news better than I could have expected.  It was not a comfortable conversation, but nonetheless friendly and understanding.  Looking back, we both acted in the “Keep calm and carry on” mindset, and probably hid the true impact this had on both of us.  I certainly acted like an uncaring jackass…probably a coping mechanism for my guilt and discomfort.  Nonetheless, the episode became a minor bump in our friendship, rather than a pitfall.  This surgery was painful, yes, but the knife healed, and we were able to recover quickly.