Just ugh!

[Ben Davis]

You will never be able to friend your way into a girl's bed.

Every serious relationship I've had (and a few frivolous ones!) has started as a friendship and some one-night-stands have turned into friendships and then into relationships. I've always been the type of guy who wants to know someone before I get serious (n.b. sex isn't always serious!).

So to me, 'Friendzone' seems to be a recent invention, a mainly-useless oversimplification, created by jealous people as a way of traversing the 'denial/anger/bargaining' stage of the grief cycle. I find it unrepresentative of the complexity of human relationships and it bears little resemblance to many successful relationships where, like mine, friendship was one of the keys to identifying a suitable partner.

Yes, I know from experience that it feels horrible when someone you like doesn't reciprocate (unrequited love's a bastard!), especially when you're close to them and maybe have to watch them form relationships with someone else. And yes, given the likely amount of emotional investment, it's easy to see how someone might feel 'entitled' to affection; loss & shock can easily skew our perceptions of others' motives and our emotions. But reifying & rationalising it as a 'friendzone'? Well that's just trapping yourself in the grief cycle; it'll harm your other relationships to view some in this way.

I'll dump 'the friendzone' in with other pseudoscientific nonsense.