friend zone

The zone was set up as a clock. In a 1994 episode of Friends (opens in a new window), Joey tells Ross that he “waited too long to make your move, and now you’re in the friend zone.” Ross says he is “laying the groundwork,” getting “just a little bit closer” every day, and Joey finishes the sentence for him: “Priesthood!” The advice in the original is short and sound. Ask her out soon, or stop counting the days as progress. The phrase kept the zone and dropped the advice.

The market sells the exit. A dating coach’s guide to escaping it (opens in a new window) prescribes a stair-step that begins “greet her with a warm hug,” moves through playful taps on the arm and eye contact, and ends “hold her hand,” with a book and 1:1 coaching attached. The criticism arrived early. In 2013 Salon listed 6 reasons (opens in a new window) the phrase should die, among them that it treats helping a friend move, or going to her sister’s birthday party, as something that entitles a man to sex.

Under load, the zone is often a measurement error. A 2012 study of 88 pairs of cross-sex friends (opens in a new window) found the men more attracted to their friends than the women were, and found them overestimating how attracted their friends were to them, while the women underestimated. The man inside the zone has frequently drawn it himself, from a reading of her that she did not supply, and he then books the friendship she did supply as the loss.

In this file the word worked the other way. On September 3, at a bar, a woman on her own asked whether my friend and I were together, and we both said no, we are just friends. Before minute 10 I was standing next to someone she was talking to. After it I was the subject of the conversation. I had said nothing, bought nothing and proposed nothing. The friendship was not a zone I had been left in. It was a credential, disclosed on request by a third party, and it did in 10 minutes what 120 days of groundwork had been bought to do.