On "The Friend Zone"

 This doesn't really relate to my life at all, but I wrote it in a comment on a post that came across my news feed, and then I realized that I write a lot of comments about things that I feel rather strongly about and then they just disappear and I never see them again. So I'm saving this one here. The post said "men talk about the friend zone a lot but something that doesn't get talked about is the pain you feel as a woman when you realize you didn't have a friend... you had a man pretending to care for you so he could sleep with you."

I said, Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, and I'm not claiming to be an expert, but I feel like the "friend zone" is a direct result of toxic masculinity--not in that men are "pretending to care so they can fuck" but in that many men raised in this culture literally do not understand how to have emotionally close relationships that do not involve sex, or even that such relationships exist. I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, but I suspect that many of these men are not "pretending to care" --they DO care--but they think that anyone they feel that close to must automatically be a romantic partner. This causes socialization and mental health problems in their own lives, because many, many men do not have any emotionally close relationships at all, or none outside of their romantic partner. It's a much bigger problem than just "the friend zone," although obviously the friend zone is a big problem all on its own."