I put it everywhere.
You hear it all the time. It’s rule #1 for men who’d rather get it in than listen to your opinions on healthcare and fundamental physics: don’t get friend zoned! It’s also the first question that men (and women, but less so) have when they’d like to take things further with their platonic friend (how to get out?). The friend zone may be frustrating if you’re ready to make your friend your SO, but the way out of it is easy once you know which way to go.
For a long time, I was out putting my tongue in everything I could. It was fun and absolutely thrilling to discover the sort of sexual power you could have over a boy by just kissing him. I always understood that my relationships weren’t going to last and that I was just having fun, though, so the stuff of high school sweethearts seemed a funny joke that people deceived themselves into believing. Never was it a big deal if I broke it off with someone. Relationships were about power, and so as far as all of my good buddies went, they were just too cool to wield power over.
“If Karen would just look at me, I know she’d love me.”
My peers were a different story. They were the friend-zoned and the ones prone to heartbreak and drama. The meeker boys around me were reduced to maniacal pining over never-to-be-conquered friends. Many of them were so fixated on the one muse of their holy and undying love that they neglected to taste the milk of other poppies in the field. But they wanted a committed relationship as much as I did; they just wanted to get laid. For them, sex and the other delights were so far out of reach that they had to deceive themselves into thinking that if their muse would consider them as partner(just once!) they would be bedded together for life. Sadly, they had probably already been considered and discarded as possibilities.
The difference between someone who gets friend zoned and someone who doesn’t is simply that one of those people moves on after they have been rejected, and the other does not. The one who doesn’t move on is then so arrogant that they believe they haven’t been considered, and if they were, they would be adored and loved without any hang-ups. The friend zone is a silly self deception. You get out of it by being a hero and just letting your muse escape you. There is plenty of milk in the poppy field.