Re-zoning the Friend Zone

I’ve been male for 39 years now, and in that time I’ve learned a thing or two about other males and how we function. For the good of all I’m writing a three part series about why men generally do what we do. I write “generally” because there are many broad generalizations in what you are about to read; generalizations, anecdotal evidence, conjecture, and my own personal insight as a straight male of color. I hope you find this somewhat useful. 

The rock is your self-respect

     I have often been in the Friend Zone; I own land there, I pay taxes there. I'm part of the Friend Zone Homeowner's Association. When I used to complain about the friend zone it was a generally accepted “thing.” It was harmless joke, something people referred to when they were down in the dumps. It wasn't necessarily gender specific, although it was applied to and primarily used by men. Everyone knew what you meant when you said that “I’m stuck in the friend zone.” There was no controversy surrounding the phrase back then. “Friend Zone” referred to a certain relationship state where person A is romantically interested in person B, but person B is not interested in person A the same way. Hence person A is stuck in the friend zone. It is a state in which Person B has genuine affection for person A, but not enough to be in a relationship. There is a nuance here that is lost on many people, specifically men, and specifically me. I’ll elaborate.

     I’m 39, which means that I formed all of my opinions about how relationships with women work in the 80’s. This was a terrible, terrible thing that happened to many men in Gen X and should never be repeated. John Hughes basically fucked up an entire generation of men (and women, but in a different way.) I never actually saw any of his movies but Hughes's work was part of the 80's zeitgeist. It was impossible to evade the effects of his works.I’m not sure how things worked in the cities, but in the Suburbs my generation was often left to its own devices when trying to figure out how to deal with interpersonal relationships. Our parents, the “Boomers,” were discovering that the American Dream needed constant upkeep and repair, and without such care it turned into American alcoholism, American Divorce, and American Major Depressive Disorder. They had their own shit to deal with. So, starved and desperate for romantic direction we had to figure out a blueprint for life from pop culture. The teen comedies, they ruined us. I’m talking about Porky’s (1982), Risky Business (1983), Heathers (1988) and countless others. I never saw those, but I watched a shitload of 80’s sitcoms. If there’s one thing I learned from 80’s television is that being a sincere, sensitive, caring “nice guy” who listened to a woman’s feelings was a sure way to get some vag.

Will they or won't they?

     As I discussed in "The Nice Guy Paradox" the Nice Guy lie negatively influenced male behavior for 30 years. I was often called “a nice guy” mostly because I wasn’t a dick to people. At least, I was rarely a dick. At least, I thought that I was rarely a dick... I'm going to change topics now. Anyway, I thought this was a positive thing. Men really are toddlers with guns, angry machines of destruction with little to no insight into our emotions or motivations. There I was, trying to become the sensitive caring-but-charming guy that got the girl instead of the antagonist of the story who was always an objectively better choice for a relationship than the protagonist (me.) Steve Urkel couldn’t get Laura the way he was, so he became Stephan. How many seasons did Kevin blow trying to feel up Winnie Cooper?

Really, could you blame Kevin?

     Think of the role models I had: Saved by the Bell, Who’s the Boss, Growing Pains. Sam and Diane, Jack, Chrissie, and Janet, Alf and Willie, Tony and Angela, Whitley and Dwayne, Peg and Al, Harry and Christine, Maddie and David… these wildly contrasting couples were all I had to go on. Is it any wonder I came out with my dating head up my dating ass?  I was confused. All I knew for certain is that I really, really, really wanted to be near girls, touching girls, looking at girls. To be honest from 10-13 I wasn’t absolutely certain what I would do with a girl when I got one, but I figured I would cross that bridge when I came to it. I had a point A and a point C and no idea what point B was, or how to get from one to another. I had one piece of rock-solid knowledge, one plan, one egg that all my baskets were in. If I had never picked up this faulty cognition who knows how differently my life would have turned out. If you want to be a boyfriend you have to be her friend first. Believing that was my first and biggest mistake.

     As it turns out, if you become someone’s friend they tend to think of you as a friend. Go figure. Building to a relationship through friendship made sense to me because it’s how I would ideally start going out with someone. Who wants to date someone they don’t know, I thought. Honestly I think many relationships fail because people become genital friends before they become emotional friends, but I digress. Many of the women I’d come to like in life were friends who I fell for. When I would broach the subject of dating, or try to set up that perfect romantic set piece, it would always blow up in my face.  The woman would often say “I never thought of you that way” to my eternal consternation. Sneaking into a relationship under cover of Nice Guy often meant that the girl I liked, never being approached romantically, never thought of me in a romantic way. This is how 98% of Friend Zone situations happen. Now I know to make my intentions clear within the first few times I meet a girl, and then take things from there; only took me 20 years to figure that out. In this way I avoid the friend zone but often get told that I'm too aggressive. Sigh.

     Boys are taught to never give up, that if you really believe and work hard enough, you can win anything you want in life. We never take no for an answer. When you look at men’s approach to women it all makes sense now doesn’t it? My generation was raised to believe that if you put enough work into winning a girl over, you would persevere. You would win. And in 99% of life, this is the correct course of action. Hard work and perseverance will often bring you your heart’s desire; what it can’t bring you is someone else’s heart. It took me a very… very long time to figure out that you can put effort into making a relationship work, but you can’t work to get into a relationship. You can’t work on someone else anyway. What they should have been telling us is that if you work on making yourself a better man, then women will come on their own accord. Now that I think about it, maybe someone did tell me that, but it was probably too late, I was obsessed; I still am. I’ve always been obsessed with women (Ironically before I hit puberty I hated girls.) Once I thought they were inferior in every way, and then I thought that they were superior in every way. Some of you may recognize this pattern of thinking as “Splitting.” Splitting is a cognitive distortion that pretty much defined much of my youth. It’s the tendency for a person to only think and perceive in absolutes; people are either all good or all bad. I thought women were all good; I often elevated chosen women to the status of goddesses or what people refer to today as “Beyoncé.” When I liked a girl she was Beyoncé, and when, inevitably, she disappointed or let me down (rejected me) she became the exact opposite of Beyoncé, Lena Dunham. Only in the mind of a screwed-up lust fueled boy could one woman go from Beyoncé to Lena Dunham in the space of one day.

Did I really need an excuse to insert a picture of Beyonce?

     You see this behavior everywhere from men. Watch any emotionally dysfunctional man get rejected from a woman. She goes from B to D in a heartbeat. The Virgin-to-Whore Express runs 24 hours a day in some guys minds. Unfortunately I still do this in my head, but I’m aware enough to spray myself with a water bottle and hit myself on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when I realize that I am thinking this way. “No! Bad Id! No!” If you are a guy reading this and don’t understand why it is a problematic way to interpret the world, walk with me talk with me. I once was strongly in like with a girl, let’s call her Rachel. I’d talked with her for a while and discovered that we had everything in common (in my mind.) Let’s say she’s a nerdy, geeky WoC who is intelligent, and funny. She gets all the weird malfunctions in my personality and actually finds them endearing. We talk for hours about what it’s like to be Brown people in White Nerd World. I feel like we are bonding on a molecular level. She’s beautiful and has all my preferred secondary sexual characteristics in abundance.* At this point I am idealizing her. She has flaws certainly, but I’m not being realistic about that. I make my move eventually and tell her that I want to be together, and she blocks my shot like Marty Brodeur. Turns out that she had already evaluated me as a partner and didn’t think it was a good fit. Now, nothing about the relationship has changed, not in the way she sees me. I respectfully disagree, and now am feeling three extremely strong emotions at the same time:

1.       Confusion

2.       Hurt

3.       Anger

The confusion comes because I honestly don’t see how she doesn’t see that we SHOULD (see there’s that word again) be together. The hurt comes because it always hurts when someone tells you that they prefer the company of other’s to your specific company. Anger, because that’s the only emotion men are ever really allowed to express. So now I have an abundance of hurt and confusion rolling itself up in anger with nowhere to go. I did everything the right way so all of this pain must be her fault. Since it’s HER fault and SHE destroyed MY vision of who I thought she was, now she is the enemy. She’s stupid for not seeing how great we could be together. Bonus rage; she gets together with a Nice Guy who I find to be inferior to me. Sometimes I will react in this situation by thinking “I didn’t try hard enough. I just have to work harder to MAKE her love me. I have the Touch. I have the Power!” So now I’m doing increasingly desperate gestures to win her heart, gestures that to an outside observer seem unhinged and psychotic. When you look back at 80’s pop culture, The Grand Gesture always worked. Think of the movie trope of a Person B leaving Person A’s life because he can’t commit. In the climactic scene, Person A confronts her at the gate to her flight wild-eyed and short of breath. He proclaims his undying love for her, and the woman always says “I love you too” and purposely misses her very expensive flight out of town. It’s such a guy way of thinking; if she doesn’t like me the way I am ROMANCE BIGGER AND HARDER TIL SHE LOVES ME! In reality these actions often frighten women away, and the rejection intensifies. Now I am devaluing her and directing anger at her. Since my behavioral pattern is to take anger on women out on myself, I would get depressed and stress eat or do something else self-destructive.

     Sometimes if I could stand it, I would still be friends with the girl, hoping that whenever her relationship ended (because these things happen) that I would be there to score her on the rebound. I specifically got this message from Seinfeld (“The Wait Out” Season 7 episode 23.)

JERRY: But we gotta make it seem like we're not calling for dates.

ELAINE: Then why are we calling?

JERRY: Good question. (More to himself than to Elaine) Why are we calling?

(Both start chanting "why are we calling..", thinking deeply)

ELAINE: (Loud) Oh! (Jerry has a surprised look) I've got it! I've got it! We're calling just to say, "I'm there for you."

JERRY: (Nodding, trying it out) "I'm there for you."

ELAINE: Then, after a period of being "there for you", we slowly remove the two words "for you", and we're just (Makes a "ta-da!" gesture) "there".

I’ve heard this works, but only if the person you’re waiting on has already run a dating sim of you two together in their head. If not It’s never going to work. I’m not going to get into whether it’s a morally right or wrong way to go about getting a date because really, all’s fair. I’m saying it’s not an effective way to go about winning someone’s heart. I’ve done all of these and none of them have ever worked, not because I wasn’t trying hard enough (believe me, I did) but because there wasn’t going to be a relationship there. Apparently when a woman identifies a guy as a friend a friend he shall stay unless some unforeseen circumstance changes the way she sees you. The trick is guys, that what changes her mind is not something that you can consciously manifsest. You are wasting financial and emotional resources on her when they could be better spent on yourself or someone who is actually interested in you. Changes may be needed yes, but change things about yourself not for her but for you. The hardest part to write here is that no matter how much self-improvement you do, you still may not get the girl of your dreams. That frustration and loneliness is incredibly hard to live with, I know that better than most. The thing is you have to live with it because it is NOT her fault and she is NOT a monster for not wanting to go out with you. One of the biggest emotional growth spurts I ever managed was seeing women as people; not angels or demons, but people with their own merits and flaws just like everyone else. Not dating you may indeed be a mistake, but it’s her mistake to make and her mistake to fix if she ever sees it that way. The fact that it took me, a guy with an extremely high emotional IQ decades to realize women are people shows you how distorted the average man’s perception of the average woman must be.

One of these people murdered the other minutes after this picture was taken.

Finally we come to the nuance that I, and I suspect many men, have never been able to master. A woman can like you as a friend; and that’s OK. You’re friendship may mean the world to a woman, and without it she could possibly be devastated. But she only specifically sees you as a friend. The fact that I keep typing “only a friend” shows my only cognitive distortion that friendship is not a desirable relationship status with some women. In the past 10 years of my life I realized that I’ve actually had to stop remaining friends with women that I’m romantically interested in because I do not possess the emotional maturity necessary to be able to handle seeing her with another guy. I know it’s childish and petty, but I’m just not there yet. Knowing my limitations is where I am, and for now that has to be good enough because what else is there? I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the idea of a woman finding me very date-able but not wanting to date me. A friend once told me that I was attractive but she was not attracted to me; my head still gets swimmy when I think about it. There are probably lots of women reading this who are thinking “yeah I get that” and lots of guys reading this saying “WTF?!?!” And you are all right. I don’t get that nuance. I did eventually realize that a friendship can be just as intimate as a relationship, and that allowed me to hold on to many friendships that I wouldn’t have been able to before.

This is pure speculation, but I think male behavior states that if you are attracted to a woman and she wants to have sex with you, you have sex with her, whether you want to be in a relationship or not. It seems that modern women are subscribing to this philosophy more and more as they feel less constrained by societal definitions of “ladylike” behavior. But what do I know about that. What I do know is that the Friend Zone is a real status, and no more good or evil than any other arbitrary definition of the emotional space between two humans. What men need to understand is that no one is ever “trapped” in the Friend Zone. I own a condo and some beachfront property in the Friend Zone. People know my name there. I run the Friend Zone like Diddy runs the city. The key is one day I realized that the only thing trapping me in the Friend Zone was me. It's not the Hotel California, you can leave anytime you want to. If you cannot handle being a woman’s friend and not her lover, you need to be open and clear about that. Skulking and sulking and trying to win her heart will only breed animosity and mistrust. Being open and honest about feelings, while painful in the short term, is vital to long term emotional health. If you can’t do that, and the shame and hurt and confusion and rage just won’t let you move on, talk to someone. Get a therapist, or email me, I always answer my emails.Talk about it before the Friend Zone becomes a War Zone.

It is my firm belief that unless you have the necessary insight and maturity to handle such an arrangement, you (men) should not stay friends with a woman they are in love with. All of that love will eventually turn into proportional rage. I know that I still on occasion have a lot of difficulty being friends with a woman I really like, and if I recognize I am moving in that direction I bail out as soon as possible. Neither of us wants those problems. There is a reason that throughout human history the tale of the spurned and jealous lover is a constant throughout all peoples. If you are not aware google haw many women are victims of assault or murder at the hands of men they have rejected. It's staggering and frightening and we will cover this exact issue in part 3 of this dating trilogy for men, "The Crazy Ex-Boyfriend."

CONTINUE? [YES]  NO

The Nice Guy Paradox

I’ve been male for 39 years now, and in that time I’ve learned a thing or two about other males and how we function. For the good of all I’m writing a three part series about why men generally do what we do. I write “generally” because there are many broad generalizations in what you are about to read; generalizations, anecdotal evidence, conjecture, and my own personal insight as a straight male of color. I hope you find this somewhat useful. 

Neither Russell Crowe nor Ryan Gosling appear in this essay

There is a popular saying that Nice Guys Finish Last, and they usually do. Gen X was taught that if nice guys persevere and are nice enough, we would win in the end. In the minds of the undersexed girl-crazed teenage boy, winning meant getting the girl and living happily ever after. Of all the problematic outcomes of this train wreck of thinking, one of the worst is the Nice Guy/Bad Boy Paradox. The Paradox is that in trying to be a Nice Guy, many men end up becoming a worse person than the Bad Boy. The Nice Guy Lie, that being a nice person will bring you sex, has negatively influenced male behavior for 30 years. It was a lie that I chafed against and caused me no end of cognitive dissonance. Changing yourself to fit what someone else’s idea of the perfect person is puts you on the fast track for emotional implosion, but many men don’t figure that out until it’s too late. If you were a guy for whom attracting women didn’t come easily or naturally (like me) you were always looking for some kind of an edge to make up for whatever your perceived shortcomings were. Over time as our desperation increased jealousy and anger at the more fortunate but seemingly less deserving men of the world increased in kind. We could not understand how seemingly intelligent women could choose unevolved pond scum over Nice Guys like us. Eventually we were filled with directionless rage magnified by society, men and women, telling us that we are single losers because we don’t want to change. Instead of help, society invalidates the negative feelings of men who by society’s standards don’t qualify as men. Guys like me thought that changing into something we weren’t was the only way to succeed, because being ourselves wasn’t getting us anywhere.

I didn’t choose the Nice Guy life, the Nice Guy life chose me, and it rubs me the wrong way to this day. I am not a nice guy. I’m an angry, self-centered, hedonistic, gluttonous, ball of negativity masquerading as a real live boy. I was slapped with the Nice Guy label mostly because I always try to do the right thing, whether I want to or not, and most of the time I don’t want to. I was often called a Nice Guy mostly because I wasn’t a dick to people, and I hated it. I can’t tell you how many times girls told me they weren’t romantically interested in me because I “was too nice.” Nothing is more confusing than telling a teenage boy that being a good person is stopping him from being able to touch a boob. Trust me; no teenage boy is choosing altruism and a life of servitude over touching a boob. It’s not outlandish to think that a Nice Guy shouldn’t have trouble dating but for guys like me that was often the case. I believed that if I became friends with a girl I liked and was the Nice Guy that people said I was eventually she would let me touch her boobs. Simple guy logic. If you glean nothing else from this exercise in apologist narcissism, remember that guy logic is simplistic, almost infantile. Lots of boys saw being a sensitive, caring, and sincere person as a means to an end, not a goal itself. It didn’t matter if you actually were all of those things or if you even believed in them; if you could become (or fake) those traits women had to want you. “I SHOULD be able to get a woman as a Nice Guy” is what we were told and told ourselves. The word “should” has caused more and bloodier violence than any other word in any human language.  If you wanted a girl you had to be the kind of guy you thought she wanted.

The problem every Nice Guy encounters is that at some point the Bad Boy comes along and easily scores the woman you’ve been plotting on for months, sometimes years. Inevitably the target of your affection will Uber over to your swanky apartment in the Friend Zone and tell you all about how Bad Boy screwed her over. After she has soaked your shirt with her tears, you’ll get a hug and stuck with the Uber bill as she goes straight back to Bad Boy. You discover that you overplayed the Nice Guy thing, and now that trait is seemingly all that’s holding you back from getting to second base. The frustrated energy this cycle generates could power Las Vegas for a month.  Being the simple creatures that we are we think “well if that’s what she likes, that’s what I’ll be.” The tragedy is that a lot of times it works! I speculate that there is some horrible lie that woman are told that attracts them to the Bad Boy, but whatever the cause it’s bad for society on general. The only thing worse than a fake bad guy is someone who overshoots Bad and hits  True Evil.

This guy never ended up in the friend zone. Be like this guy.

This is the Nice Guy Paradox; in trying to become a Nice Guy many men become actual bad people. The lying and pretending behavior becomes second nature, and gradually more and more shady behaviors become acceptable in the name of “love.” Guys at this level will see the Bad Boy with the girl they like, and think that they will do anything possible to separate those two because, after all, we know who is best for that girl right? Sometimes, like with me, this frustration and anger turned into depression and self loathing. In other cases men take that anger and frustration out on the target of their affection, with violent results.

The truth is that although the Bad Boy is 9/10 a genuine piece o shit, he is genuine. People like authenticity, even if it’s a negative sort of authentic. People know what they’re getting with a terrible person, and when things inevitably end in tears and lawsuits, no one is really surprised. When dealing with a guy who is an objective piece of shit a woman at least has the option of keeping her guard up, though whether she does or not is varies because human brains hate their human hosts. The guy who is secretly an awful person masquerading as a Nice Guy is seen as an affront, a violation, a fraud. A lot of times these Nice Guys have so lost track of who they really are they feel more and more victimized every time one of their manipulative efforts is ineffective. I know that cycle; the obsession with women and the compulsion to do anything to win her over creates a cycle of frustration, rejection and rage that often bubbles up into emotional or physical violence towards any women available.  Men really are toddlers with guns in many ways. I was out there trying to become the sensitive caring guy that got laid all the time which, shocker, may not even be a thing. Crazy thing is I do possess those traits naturally, but I still felt I had to manufacture a me that women wanted. We do this because we are never really told what women want. I was raised by all women and I still had (and possibly have) no clue how to be in a relationship with one. Men focus so much on how to get women and never talk about how to be with a woman. 

look at this sociopathic piece of shit

John Hughes lied to us. He lied to you, to me, to everyone.  If 80’s pop culture taught me anything, it’s that all women go for the rich/handsome/athletic guy, but what they really yearn for in their heart is the nerdy, awkward sensitive guy.  All we, the awkward, homely/unpopular nerds of the world had to do is try, try hard, and never give up. The Grand Gesture always seemed to work, and the girl-of-our-dreams would immediately leave the guy who by all traditional standards of success was the far superior choice, and fall in love with us forever. When you look back at 80’s pop culture, The Grand Gesture always worked. Think of the movie trope of a Person B leaving Person A’s life because he can’t commit. In the climactic scene, Person A confronts her at the gate to her flight wild eyed and short of breath. He proclaims his undying love for her, and the woman always says “I love you too” and purposely misses her very expensive flight out of town. It’s such a guy way of thinking; if she doesn’t like me the way I am I’LL ROMANCE BIGGER AND HARDER TIL SHE LOVES ME! In reality these actions often frighten women away, and the rejection intensifies. Now I am devaluing her and directing anger at her. Since my behavioral pattern is to take anger on women out on myself, I would get depressed and stress eat or do something else self-destructive.

when Nice Guys snap you get Michael Douglas

Nice guys don't finish last, or first. Like everyone else who has ever lived, all nice guys do is finish. If you finish alone and unloved or surrounded by family is up to you. And further also, when we come across guys who complain about not being able to meet women, the exact wrong answer is to call them losers for not fixing everything about themselves to make themselves more attractive to women. One of the reasons we are all crazy is that society sends us mixed signals. Being gay has always been used as a pejorative for men. Sharing your emotions with other men was “gay.” As such we are strongly encouraged to not share our feelings or ask for help. When men do complain about the difficulty they have with women, they are belittled, especially by those calling themselves feminists. Many times the insults are warranted because of the way men complain about things, but consider this;

I've only had one teacher who every got me, and his name was Nathaniel J. Pallone. He told us a story in class that was relevant here. People who try to eat lobster and crabs use tools to do so. You need tools to crack open the shells to get to the delicious meat inside. If you don't have tools you have to use your fingers and fists, smashing, breaking and tearing the meal apart until you and all your dinner companions are covered in crustacean goo. Lobsters are like emotions; if you have the proper tools., you can deal with them clearly and efficiently. If you don't you're just going to make a big mess. Many men do not have the social and interpersonal tools necessary to deal with the opposite sex and consequently make a big damn mess everywhere they go. And that's what we do. 

One of the most confusing aspects of reality to me is that no one ever believes me when I say that I have INCREDIBLE difficulty attracting and retaining women. It's one of the most traumatic areas of my life, but no one has ever been what I'd call sympathetic to my issues and with few exceptions I've always had to deal with them on my own. It's hard. I'm a pretty modern insightful dude though so therapy has helped in this area. At this point in life it's pretty hard to unlearn all of the mistakes and faulty cognitions, but progress has been made. For many men it's too late to see that the problem isn't everyone else, but sometimes honest listening can do a lot to humanize a Nice Guy. It's a start. This whole clusterfuck of good intentions and shitty strategy has to end somewhere. I think the only way to start is for men to be more transparent and for society in general to stop making us feel shitty for it. Trying to be a nice guy to get sex hurts everyone, and often leads to the unfortunate circumstance of being trapped in the friend zone. Speaking of...

CONTINUE? [YES]  NO

The Roadrunner-Free Diet

If you are reading this you probably understand the relationship between the Roadrunner and the Coyote. If not, how the hell did you get to this blog anyway? I will explain, in any event, for those who are Warner Bros. Impaired. Wile E. Coyote spent the greater part of his existence chasing after the Roadrunner. He occasionally branched out from this pursuit in an attempt to steel fat sheep, but he was always stopped in those pursuits by the presence of a lackadaisical sheepdog named Sam. By and large Wile E. wanted that Roadrunner more than life itself, and he wasn't shy about it. Wile E. was a self proclaimed "Super Genius" and had an extremely high IQ. What made him look stupid, however, was his single-minded pursuance of the Roadrunner. No matter how ingenious his scheme, no matter how unlimited his credit with the ACME Corporation was, he could never corral that little bugger. If one really quantified the amount of resources, both time, effort, and monetary, that Wile E. sank into trying to capture and eat the Roadrunner, the effort would hardly seem worth it. With the time and money he put into acquiring the roadrunner, he could easily have had all of the finest foods in the world flown to his desert. He could have learned to become a master chef himself, becoming the greatest cook that the world has ever known. Bounty lay within his claws wherever he looked.
Yet he had to have this one bird. And what is it about this bird that is so alluring, so fascinating, that it is all that the Coyote hungers for? When one examines the Roadrunner, one does not see a particularly meaty bird. He does not seem juicy or succulent. The Roadrunner is portrayed as one of the fastest beings alive, and its musculature reflects that. The Roadrunner is lean, long, and built for speed. None of those traits suggest that it would make a delicious meal. If anything its meat would be extremely gamy from all of the activity and exercise it gets. All evidence points to the fact that the Roadrunner would not make a very good meal, and actually was quite flawed in this area. Yet and still the Coyote spent all of his energy and resources to catch it. What did Wile E. get for all of this effort?

Pain.

Ceaseless, boundless, unendurable pain. The very universe worked against him. The best laid schemes of Wile E. Coyote oft go awry. Gravity conspired against him and the laws of physics broke themselves to ensure his defeat. Objects float when they shouldn't and fall when they should fly. Fire burns according to it's own whims, and explosions are more explosive than usual. It would be one thing if these environmental accidents were random, but they are very one sided, and very much against Wile E. When the very elements of the universe would conspire against him, you would think that the Coyote would give up, but no, he presses on ever more. He bangs his head quite literally against a mountain, each time hoping for a different outcome while the Roadrunner “meep meeps” and zips away into the distance.
This is quite an accurate description of my love life for the last 22 years. I have spent my life since I was 10 years old, chasing Roadrunners. It wasn't so much that I only chased the girls that I could not have, it was more that I could never have the girls that I wanted. There were plenty of girls that I did not want, and they may have been interested in me, but I didn't know, didn't care. I was always very aware and very decisive about what birds I chased, and did so with great aplomb. Some birds kept my attention for a long time, some for only a day, but no matter what I was always chasing somebody. And the outcome of all of my chasing was very similar to that of the Coyote. I was always falling off of cliffs, crashing into mountains at ridiculously high speeds, or being blow up in any number of inventive ways. Of course I don't mean these things literally. I suffered these injuries as psychic assaults and wounds to my ego from hundreds and thousands of rejections from all of the Roadrunners I spent my life chasing. I first remember a bird catching my eye at the age of 10. I was in 5th grade and there was a 6th grader named Angela who I only saw on the playground. I didn't know why, but I would just stare at her the entire recess period, and I found myself lingering on the 6th graders side of the playground. I never chased her seriously, but she got the taste in my mouth. It wasn't until High School that I was in full Coyote mode. I reasoned that the better the trap the easier I could catch the bird. But instead of bird feed, I used romantic stories, Valentine's gifts, sweet words, sweeter acts, and every “friend-ly” act I had at my disposal to win women. And man could I attract them. I had so many female friends I didn't know what to do with them. I didn't know what to do with them because they wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do to them. I was constantly being diverted into brick walls of “friendship” or “I don't like you that way”. But did I give up? Did Wile E. Coyote ever give up? I bounced from Roadrunner to roadrunner, always chasing, never catching, but taking more and more damage all the time. It was this last point that I didn't understand until much later.
There were two points that I didn't understand until I was around 30. One was that every bird I chased was never as perfect or unique as I thought she was. She was always deeply flawed (like the Roadrunner) for my purposes, and never as unique as I thought she was. In fact, it wasn't until much later in life that I discovered really attractive women were a dime a dozen, and that really great personalities were in much shorter supply. My religious fervor in chasing women blinded me to their flaws, and in that blindness I treated them far better than I should have. That was always my first and biggest mistake. The second point that I realized entirely too late was that all the damage I took from Roadrunner chasing had left me completely bereft of self-esteem, which was in turn making it even harder for me to catch any girls. Very self-defeating cycle that is. By the time I was 27 I was dead, done; I had no self-esteem left and I was desperate. I had no defenses, but the assaults on my psyche kept coming. The boulders that fell on me, to continue the metaphor, got bigger and bigger, even after I held up my pathetic little sign that said “I Surrender”.
I would say the biggest, juiciest, and fastest Roadrunner I ever encountered was, well, I'll call her AZ. AZ was the worst for me because unlike the antagonist of Wile E. Coyote, AZ was just as devious and as much of a Genius as I was. The fact that she was so much like me was why I desired her so much. It is also why I had no chance of catching her. She would set traps for me and I would walk right into them. She wanted a game, I wanted to be caught. To this day I can't really be around her, because she destroys all of my mental defenses.
She was the one I wanted the most but not the most destructive. Lots of birds would fight for that title, Ceresa, Kia, Grace, AV, L and others who thankfully I can't remember now. New ones pop up all the time, each more perfect than the last, but in the end, like our friend the Roadrunner, they are never worth the amount of pain I go through to catch them. That's why I am now on the Roadrunner Free Diet. No more chasing birds for me. I can't have Carbs, refined Sugars, or Roadrunners. I am officially off of the market, for all the reasons seen above. I had an epiphany, recently, that if I took all the money and resources that I put into Acme Corp. and chasing roadrunners, and put it into bettering myself and focusing on school, I would probably be rich and famous by now. I have already seen some positive results from this new philosophy.
So to reiterate; no more rocket packs, no more flying outfits, no more painting tunnels on the sides of mountains, no more bird seed, no more giant magnets, and definitely no more dynamite. I'm sure life will throw some absolutely irresistible birds my way, but I will resist. I will stay focused, because I have bigger birds to fry, so to speak. This doesn't mean that I'm going to start to chase men, it just means that from now on, I have no romantic life. I can live without one, and frankly, having one hasn't ever done me more good than bad. So this is my version of the “Fabulously Single Project”. Let life come at me with whatever, but this Coyote, for once is focused on something other than chasing tail.

Like Urination for Precipitation

If you aren't familiar, there is a saying that goes something like “do not piss on my head and tell me that it is raining.” I am quite familiar with this situation because many times in my 3 decades of life I have had people unzip from above my head and subsequently warn me of coming thunderstorms. One of the most pernicious of these bamboozles is the “we can be friends” lie. For a man, and for most women, being put in the friend zone is the kiss of death; there is absolutely no worse fate than being banished, “It's a Good Life” style, to the Friend Zone. (If you don't get the reference, look it up; it's an excellent episode of the Twilight Zone). Like that episode, being banished to the Friend Zone is a cold, horrifying, soul-crushing event from which there is no return. When you have been sent there once your main goal in life is to never be banished there again. But I, for one reason or another, keep finding myself in that particular cornfield time and time again, each time through another hilariously convoluted series of events.

I believe that I have been sent to the cornfield more times than most, because I have a particular personality trait that predisposes me to leaving myself open to getting “rained” on. I have an impossible to ignore need to fix people. Now don't get me wrong; I'm no Mother Theresa/Jesus figure. I would say it’s more of an ego-syntonic drive to do what it is that I think I do best; resolve people's psychological issues. I think that most people like to do what they do best, and I am a very good psychologist, regardless of what people may say. There's another component to this tragedy that I am not sure if I have complete control over; I have a penchant for meeting women who have recently hit rock bottom in their lives. This is a big reason why I have to fix so many people, because I seem to find so many people who need fixing. I'm not talking abut women who just broke a nail, I'm talking about serious, life threatening issues. Most of the time. Sometimes they are just girls who happen to date the same type of homicidal jerks over and over again but most of the time they are women with legitimate problems in their lives that I have some sort of useful perspective on.

If this is just some random cosmic coincidence then I suppose I can't do much about it. I've tried fighting against the immutable laws of nature before, and have always come out the worse for it. I'm tired of beating my head against a wall of physics. Another, less fantastic hypothesis is that I am subconsciously attracted to “damaged” women, which is a common affliction amongst some men. I have written before about my ”Hero Complex” and how I have a inherent drive to save people. What if there is a part of me that, when there is no one around who is in any acute danger, seeks out women who are broken, damaged, or are in acute danger, and insinuate myself into their lives? What if there is a part of me that looks for emergencies so that I can “save the day” and be the hero? Ask yourself these questions if you have a similar pattern of behavior, especially if you often find yourself banished to the cornfields. There is a direct correlation between befriending damaged people and ending up in the friend zone.

What is this connection? Well, I'll tell you. One of those immutable laws of the universe I spoke of earlier is the he or she who fights the battle never lives to see the fruits of their labor. Despite what 80's movies and video games have told us, if you enter the Castle and fight the Dragon in order to save the princess, chances are in the real world that once you do risk your life and do all those acts of daring do, the princess will then immediately hook up with your unemployed stoner roommate. THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is reality. I have learned that whenever I fix someone, they inevitably run out and sleep with/fall in love with the first person they see that isn't me. I have heard stories from several men and women confirming this from their own experience as well. They have had cases where they have helped people to stop drinking, stop doing drugs, stop dating abusive men, stop dating crazy women, get jobs, go back to school, graduate school, etc. and when they finally help this person achieve their goal, they, as Kanye West said “leave they ass for a White girl”.

What I mean by that is whenever you put your heart and soul into helping someone out in life, the chances are good that when they reach that goal they will leave you for someone else, that is, if they were ever with you in the first place. Only very strong relationships don't break up when one person experiences a large change in life/status such as going from dug user to sober, or from having low self esteem to being a fully self reliant individual. The worst part of the banishing procedure is that the person who does it usually tries to convince you that it's a good thing, which is where the great lie about being rained on begins. Rodgers and Hammerstein could not compose a greater song and dance than these people do when they try to explain to you why the fact that they are essentially ditching you now that they are “better” and giving all their goodies to a complete stranger who had nothing to do with their recovery is, in fact, a positive experience for you. Some of them think that you should even be thanking them for it. They are effusive with their thankfulness. Here is an actual text I received in this situation;

“I adore you, you know that. Just not in the way you want me to. Anyway I think you're amazing and awesome and I hate that now things are probably going to be weird between you and I. I hate to lose you. You're the only guy who I've talked to consistently for a year. And I think that's because we never hooked up.”

And this, this is the part where the trickle of piss becomes a downpour;

“You should be happy, I let you in where other guys never get to go.”

Apparently that place she let me in is everywhere but her vagina. The crazy part is that this is maybe the 20 or 30^th time I've heard this speech in my life. I have the unfortunate luck to encounter women who believe that they can only sleep with men who don't care about them, and who they can't care about in return. This is, of course, lunacy. But a surprising number of women think this way. By the way, the above quotes are not doctored or taken out of context in any way. It took me a long time to realize that telling me it's a good thing that “I'm too special to sleep with” is not a good thing. It's piss disguised as rain. It's a sham, and after 3 decades I'm finally learning to grab an umbrella and step out of it. If you care about someone, and they are special to you, you should give them the greatest gift you can, which isn't “friendship”. Besides, what these people consider friendship isn't that, because the relationship is never even. The person doing the fixing never receives the same services in return. That person can never depend on the person they fixed for emotional support. The damaged person, by definition, cannot be a good friend because if they could they would probably possess other life skills that would have prevented them from becoming damaged in the first place. They are inherently selfish, and never ask about the “fixer's” problems. Therefore, the fixer is more of a tool to be used when needed than a true friend. In what way is this a tenable position for anyone? A true friendship is reciprocal, and these relationships are strictly one way. The friend zone is a lonely place, and no one ever has sex there.

So, if you are the type to be a “fixer” and you feel some trickles coming from the sky, ask yourself is this really rain I'm feeling, or something else entirely?