You know how it is, right, ladies? You know a guy for a while. You hang out with him. You do fun things with himplay video games, watch movies, go hiking, go to concerts. You invite him to your parties. You listen to his problems. You do all this because you think he wants to be your friend.
But then, then comes the fateful moment where you find out that all this time, hes only seen you as a potential girlfriend. And then if you turn him down, he may never speak to you again. This has happened to me time after time: I hit it off with a guy, and, for all that Ive been burned in the past, I start to think that this one might actually care about me as a person. And then he asks me on a date.
I tell him how much I enjoy his company, how much I value his friendship. I tell him that I really want to be his friend and to continue hanging out with him and talking about our favorite books or exploring new restaurants or making fun of avant-garde theatre productions. But he rejects me. He doesnt answer my calls or e-mails; if wed been making plans to do something before this fateful incident, these plans mysteriously fail to materialize. (This is why I never did get around to seeing the Hunger Games movie. Not to name any names, but thanks a lot, Tom.) Later, when I run into him at social events, our conversations are awkward and lukewarm. This is because the moment we met, he put me in the girlfriend-zone, and now he cant see me as friend material.
I must say that I find this really unfair. I mean, Im a nice girl. I have a lot to offer as a friend, like not being a douchebag and stuff. But males just dont want to be friends with nice girls like me. They cant help it, I guess; its just how theyre wired, biologically. Evolution conditioned our male hominid ancestors to seek nice girls as mates and form friendship bonds only with the other dudes that they hunted mammoths with. Its trueI know this because I studied hominids in my fifth-grade science class.
So whats the answer? Should I take up mammoth-hunting in an attempt to appeal to the friendship centers of mens primal lizardbrains? Should I keep making guy friends and then prevent them from making a move on me by subtly undermining their self-confidence? Should I just give up on those manipulative, game-playing, two-faced bastards once and for all? I dont know. I mean, Id really like to have a true friendship with a guy someday, but its so hard to trust and respect them when they never say what they meanand you never know when you might be relegated to the girlfriend-zone.
