But like I said in a previous post, the fact that women do NOT look for sexual attraction to a person in order to put them in a friend category is a statistical fact.
You got it backwards. We aren’t talking about women using sexual attraction “to put them in a friend category”. Friend-zone is, conceptually at least, the polar opposite of those members of the opposite sex where acting on interest or attraction (not the mere presence of it) is an open option. A woman would look for both a love interest and new friends but would friend-zone the guys she for some reason decided she didn’t want to allow herself to be attracted to (or even allow herself to act on the attraction to an extent but without actually establishing a relationship).
As for “statistical facts”, one poll, one popular-science article, does not facts make.
The odds are that if you find yourself in the friend zone, you were already there to begin with because she was never attracted.
That is not only incorrect, it is also logically impossible strictly speaking. This is because you aren’t in the friend-zone until she puts you there after some evaluation. Until that point, you aren’t yet in the friend-zone. Therefore you can’t never have been out of the friend-zone. We’re focusing on the period before evaluation or during it, not a situation several months after it.
There are exceptions to that rule, of course, but still, statistical analysis says that men and women approach cross-gender friendship differently (go figure, men and women are different, that’s what the church has been teaching for 2,000 years!)
Except that analyses and theories are plenty and they aren’t consistent with each other. Asking people direct questions about how they process their internal feelings and impulses is kinda pointless anyway because they can’t be good judges of that, and if you instead just watch them and judge their behaviour, there’s going to be a heckton of researcher bias skewing the results.
If anything, men and women have a different make-up when it comes to sexuality (something JP2 wrote about before he became Pope) and if anything, men see a clearer difference between sexual and non-sexual interest. For women, it’s more blended together and thus they can sometimes miss things that for a man would imply interest in a relationship. This, I guess, could explain men feeling misled when they are eventually told it’s only friends for them, sometimes. But this would also, admittedly, seem to undermine the concept of a “friend-zone” anyway.
According to statistical analysis, if a woman feels no attraction for a guy, friend zone is where he starts and where he stays.
That’s what they said about men some years ago, with women supposedly being anything from different to opposite. And as I said, you can’t get a statistical analysis right because you can’t rely on people’s own assessments of how they react (i.e. just poll people and process their answers at face value), nor can a researcher reliably evaluate that. A psychologist or psychiatrist could delve into it and come up with something useful but a statistician has nothing to do there.
Again, this is not a universal rule, but a statistical generality which makes it far more likely that guys were immediately put in the friend zone and didn’t realize it because the girl didn’t recognize the flirting as a real attempt at a relationship and didn’t know to put him down earlier.
That’s possible and it’s true that women can sometimes be clueless because one sex has trouble understanding the other sex’s flirting in general.
But I’ll insist that at least in the more interesting cases, friend-zone assignment (whether for men or for women) doesn’t happen in an instant, there tends to be a period of flirting or testing or evaluating or otherwise uncertainty before the decision is made. Which is sometimes conscious and sometimes comes down to deciding whether one feels the chemistry or not.
You may even have a point that plenty of people are disqualified faster than that but those are clearly one-sided cases. “Friend-zoning” in typical parlance refers to hitting an inexplicable wall, possibly for a reason that feels stupid to the person friend-zoned (regardless who’s of which sex). In short, it’s mostly about sort-of-dating situations that don’t work out.
(Most girls don’t realize that most guys seek friendships where sexual attraction IS a basis of friendship either… we all have so much to learn about each other…
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Sexual attraction is not a basis of friendships. It’s only that men are more visual and attractive looks are often the criterion by which they select some women out of a larger number to talk with. Once it’s friends, it’s not a relationship based on sexuality. Not much more than the relationship with a sibling of the opposite gender. Obviously, a sister is different from a brother and so is a female friend from a male one. But this is a very broad sense of sexuality, one that basically equates sexuality to gender differences.
You’re not getting what I’m saying… again, you’re conflating being “nice” with being “good”. It is possible to be both good and nice, but the key detail there is that favors are given for the sake of being good/nice, not because affection is expected in return.
Good is difference from nice.
Guys who think that girls “owe them a chance” because they’re SO nice to them are NOT good people, they’re vile.
Nobody owes a chance to anybody per se, although I believe in some cases people may have a bit of a “moral right” to be given a fair evaluation as opposed to being disqualified on a superficiality, and people have a right to expect a more or less serious approach before or in connection with investing themselves.
They treat women like prostitutes, whose affection and attention can be bought by gestures.
I think there’s a chance you’ve read a little bit one-sided things lately. There is a difference between a sex-for-money exchange and being nice or charming to somebody with an expectation of some reciprocity, especially in the form of a chance and not of a sure-fire, and especially if the “expectation” comes down to simply acting in a particular way as one’s way of gaining the interest of the opposite sex. Basically everybody presents some advantages and disadvantages, from time to time we compete with others and sometimes we advertise, so I guess people often rely on their particular strengths to work to their advantage. They aren’t vile when they observe that in their opinion those strengths of theirs (or whatever they have to offer) are not judged fairly by others. For example when a woman gets the feeling that a long degree means little next to a short skirt as far as her chosen man is concerned. Therefore, while manipulation and emotional coercion and emotional blackmail are vile (while people often engage in them without a large load of conscious ill will, more like not having outgrown it yet spiritually or morally), it is not vile to expect people to value good manners more than bad manners, to take kind treatment better than unkind treatment etc. Or to be outraged when faced with an asymmetrical lack of regard. (E.g. when a woman won’t just tell a man that she simply has changed her mind, made a different decision, wishes him the best and thanks him for his time etc. but no, she isn’t interested… but instead he sees her trying to treat him like a doormat and allowing other men to treat her less than respectably. I don’t believe the man is unequivocally vile here.)
If a guy wants to be genuinely good to a woman, he should be G O O D to her with no expectations in return. Being good to a woman because he thinks his actions will buy him a chance to get into a relationship with her is just sleazy, and says something about the total lack of respect that guy has for the woman in question.
There is sense in looking at it that way but it looks inconsistent and bleak when rude innuendo and disrespectful act or even abuse by others is tolerated. As in, that “nice guy” was a vile snake because he expected to begin to be considered as a potential boyfriend (one of) in return for the way he treated her, while a guy who can’t get his act together or treat her respectfully is better because he’s supposedly genuine.
At some level it’s like using someone for sex in a crude fashion is better than failing to be fully selfless when being nice to that same person. Which is manifestly poor logic.
There are guys who are nice who are vile, despicable people with no REAL respect for women. They think they can buy women’s affection like women are prostitutes
Addressed above but in brief you may be exaggerating here, also as proven by your choice of rather charged, strong vocabulary.
There are guys who are nice, who are good, they are courteous to all women with no expectation. When they do something for THEIR spouse or girlfriend, they don’t think their spouse or girlfriend OWES them anything in return.
Someone who is nice to you but is not nice to the waiter is not a nice person. Being “nice” (basically being a gentleman or a lady, I guess) is of an “
erga omnes” thing. This may actually lead to trouble with insecure romantic partners who would expect you to be dismissive or mean of all others.
There are guys who are “rough” and good, they’re not as likely to be so mushy, but at least they don’t lie to the girl or present her nice actions as a bribe for her affection.
Yup.
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