Zoned Out: Why the Traditional ‘Friendzone’ is Overly Berated, Outdated and, Frankly, Underrated

By Olivia Downing

*Names have been changed to maintain anonymity

When I first heard the word ‘friendzone’, it was practically spat at me by my long-time friend, Matt*. We were walking home from our usual fun after-school hangout: listening to our iPods in the park.

Matt and I lived on the same cul-de-sac and had been fierce friends since I’d arrived there at eight years old. We’d played out on our bikes together, and got grounded for going off our street together. We sang our favourite Nickelodeon songs in perfect harmony. I cried to him when my cat ran away. He told me about how much he hated his stepdad.

When at fourteen, out of the blue, he told me that I’d friendzoned him, my first reaction was, what do you mean? Weren’t we, after all that time, after all those experiences, best friends? The answer, of course, was no.

Matt, like so many other (predominantly young) men, was simply hanging around in the disillusioned instance that I might leave my current boyfriend and choose him instead. I didn’t believe these newly expressed feelings had always been there.

When I say you can feel the shift between the sexes in your teens, I mean that literally. It’s subtle but visceral: like the delicate, spider web stretch marks that first appear when you start to grow hips. Incidentally, puberty is exactly when this shift begins to shake friendship foundations.

There was a time when it was fine for Matt and me to be friends. And then, suddenly, there wasn’t. I was impervious to all of this, maybe because I was relatively inexperienced with boys romantically. All I really remember was the dismayed look in his eyes when he’d mentioned being friendzoned. Like somehow, I’d betrayed him. I never expected to see that look again, especially not in my thirties.

Keith* was a part-time colleague of mine that I’d met aged twenty-five (he was thirty-five). We’d bumped into each other at an industry-related event, but after a few drinks and deeper conversations, we discovered a mutual love of Shakespeare and old British comedy that really bonded us.

Outside of work, we went to plays, exhibitions and writers’ workshops. I was his trusted confidant about his troubled childhood. He was my first port of call when my grandad passed away. We never, ever flirted. There were no drunken passes, no mixed messages and to be honest, that is what I loved about him.

I’d never met a man who I could be so implicitly open and comfortable with without any fear of judgement, sexual advances or expectation. So, when he turned around to me four years later and said that he couldn’t hang out with me anymore, I felt completely side-lined. ‘You friendzoned me a long time ago, Liv,’ he said. ‘I thought I could get over it, but I just can’t.’ The same reaction that I’d had sixteen years earlier swept over me like a tsunami. I couldn’t believe this conversation was happening again, particularly as an adult.

There is much discourse online to be found from petulant incels about how infuriating it is to be friendzoned, but I would argue that there is nothing more painful than having a breakup (yes, a breakup) with a friend who never really was. Whose care for you was reliant on a reciprocation that you weren’t even aware of.

Everything you’ve gone through feels cheapened: the most flammable, polyester form of personal relationships. And the worst part is that there’s no acceptable form of grieving for this. You can’t drink with your girlies, change your hair colour and swipe right over a trusted friend that you’ve lost. It’s a silent, lonely grief.

Whenever men talk about the friendzone, it’s always derogatory. Being put in the friendzone is beta, shameful, second only to not having female company at all. But surely the ‘friendzone’ is not a punishment but a privilege: a chance to reclaim the innocent worlds we once inhabited before sex became our raison d’être and where love is preserved in its purest form.

It’s well documented that, despite the Disney paradigm that we are led to believe, one person to meet all of our needs is not only unrealistic but unimaginative. Modern day men and women rely on a close network of friends to supplement the needs their partner can’t fulfil. Why then is the friendzone seen as blasphemous when, arguably, it is the highest egalitarian honour any of us could hope to achieve? To be appreciated, loved even, not because of our sex, but explicitly because of who we are as people?

I appreciate that I might be fighting against something that is so intrinsic to our nature, sexual ego and hormones that you could say it was a lost cause to begin with. But in a world where gender is fluid and people can choose who and how to love, it strikes me as desperately tragic and non-insightful that we don’t give platonic love the platform or prestige it deserves.

Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love is a homage not to romantic love but to enduring female friendships and how they shape our lives. Could this not apply to opposite-sex friendships too? After all, if we could be more open to the idea that friendship between the sexes might not be purgatory but rather a place where the most life-enhancing, long-lasting relationships can flourish, the zone itself crumbles. In that place, the limits of love are truly endless.