In last Thursday's Voices, assistant sports editor Kyle Ratke wrote about how hard it is to know what girls are thinking and how girls say they look for a guy with a good sense of humor, but actually having one sends a guy straight into the Friend Zone.
This is a universal problem. Dating is difficult, men and women don't understand each other and things will never, ever get easier.
First off: why the Friend Zone? People who have left someone there will say it's because they just didn't have romantic feelings for that particular person. This is partially true, but what they won't admit is how it can be satisfying to have power over others, knowing they want you and that you can keep spending time together and do whatever you want without having to feel guilty because hey, you're just friends. Really, really good friends.
If you do decide to put someone in the Friend Zone, for the love of God, try to do it before more-than-friends things happen. After that it's an insult. It says that someone is good enough to hang out with and, well, use, but not date.
I would like to point out that guys aren't the only ones who end up in the relationship wasteland that is the Friend Zone. I'm the girl a guy calls when he's having an emotional crisis at 2 a.m., the really good female friend and the only person he can really tell his feelings to and who is a super special girl, so special that he doesn't want to get into a relationship for fear of destroying the wonderful friendship we all ready have.
It's pretty weird how having an honest connection with a guy automatically counts you out as a possible girlfriend.
What really sucks is how this doesn't seem to ever pay off. Later in life, after falling for and getting left by the bad boy, the cute girls all of a sudden appreciate the good guy. What becomes of the nice girls, the ones who make the guy feel better about all his insecurities and surprise him with presents and cake on his birthday? They either get a bunch of cats and call it a day or become so career driven that they forget about marriage and kids until menopause.
Females do have the advantage when it comes to guessing what the opposite sex is thinking, since it can normally (though not always, I'll give you guys some credit) be narrowed down to beer, sports or sex. This, however, does not make us feel any better, because it means a guy is either thinking of us naked or not thinking of us at all.
I know girls aren't innocent. We know exactly what we're doing without having any real idea of why we're doing it. From this idea emerges something I'm half-proud, half-ashamed of: the female player. Female players don't try to be idiots. They just try to prove they can date like guys.
I could just be cynical. My last relationship got too serious too fast with someone too controlling (word to the wise: love should be a verb, not a noun and it sure as hell shouldn't be conditional), and because of this the idea of "commitment" kind of sounds nice to me but mostly makes me hyperventilate. Still, it sucks to watch my friends hook up with other people/each other now that I've pretty much listed my relationship status as "whatever" and rented an apartment in the Friend Zone.
At least Ratke will keep me company. I've heard he can be a pretty good friend.
Dannie Higginbotham is a Reporter staff writer
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