Okay, here’s the crux of it I think. As I said, it’s been 18 years since my last “first date” that I may have missed this wrinkle. It was a perfectly disarming, funny, specific word if used with one’s male friends. If it’s used as a direct challenge, I could see it could become pretty caustic.
Thanks everyone. So nice when a discussion can illuminate on a point like this. That said, I hate when people come along and fuck up words that I like. I guess I’ll have to go to my preferred predecessor to this word, “Heisman”, as in “she gave me the Heisman.”
I don’t think I’d want to be with someone who thinks of love as a betrayal!
I think that love and friendship largely overlap. People who are friends first seem to actually know each other better than those who aren’t. I don’t understand why love would need to invalidate friendship, either. YCHUOMMV
So, people who proclaim love should not be close to you? Then how would they know you that well? You said that when people are close friends, that them expressing their love is a betrayal. Wouldn’t this seem more credible than coming from a stranger who couldn’t know you that well? How/why does this end the friendship? This certainly makes it sound like friendship and love don’t overlap.
I guess I’ve never believed them to be very distinct categories. But if love is deeper and more involved, it would seem natural to assume that it would more likely develop from friendship than appear from nowhere. But for me, they have often been the same, or overlapped.
He says that heart disease is statistically man’s worst enemy. Statistically, it’s also woman’s worst enemy. If you need an actual person, women are their own worst enemy.
My point is not that it isn’t a problem, because clearly it is. My point is that murderous violence by men against women is seen as something almost typical, when that is far from the case. Louis CK and Scott Adams can speak for themselves if they think that women aren’t safe around them.
You’re right, it isn’t. There’s definitely an entitlement issue where men can feel that it’s their “turn”. I think having more equality where both genders get to express interest and there’s more open discussion about social etiquette (how to express interest in an honest and respectful way, how to accept/reject and how to respond to rejection gracefully) might help to make things clearer and separate the assholes from the socially inept.
I first heard it in an early episode of Scrubs, where Eliot (the lead female character) came on to JD (the male lead), and a countdown began indicating that if they didn’t have sex by the time it reached zero it was never going to happen because it’d effect their friendship. Naturally they miss a number of chances and eventually JD is relegated to ‘the friendzone’ but he doesn’t resent Eliot or let it come between them as friends.
Of course, they go on to date off and on and eventually marry, because it’s an American sitcom.
Didn’t I say that I was guessing, to provide an obvious answer to your question?
You seem to be making this out to be a value judgement. But, by definition, if something is not deeper, it is more superficial. Is this not so?
What interests me is: How does anybody would arrive at what you call “romantic” without having progressed through friendship first? This is probably the third or fourth time I have tried rephrasing the question.
FWIW I don’t dispute that people who approach either friendship or love from a position of entitlement are being needy infantile jerks.
But being autistic and yet endlessly fascinated by people, I am still always amazed by how and why people happen to end up together. It seems almost deliberately mysterious, like some weird set of rituals which nobody is supposed to truly understand.
