I has a HS friend who was madly in love with some guy and it messed up her life real bad pretending she can just be his friend. She was like some vampire thrall, it was heartbreaking to watch. Pretty sure she's still suffering from it. I wouldn't recommend deluding yourself that you can genuinely be friends with someone you're romantically attracted to. It is neither in your nor their best interest.

As a bi enby I can't even separate "wanting to be like someone" from "wanting to be with someone," let alone clearly separating platonic, romantic, and sexual feelings. Like I just wanna hang out and do whatever we vibe with, and that could include sexy stuff or cuddly stuff or hobby stuff or deep conversations or whatever. I guess ideally I would try to see someone not being interested in sex as similar to them not being interested in going skydiving together, though there's a lot of social conditioning that can make that difficult in practice. Generally though if I think somebody's cool then I'm happy to be able to hang out with them in whatever capacity works.

Especially when many of us are willing to send people to the enemy zone

Once upon a time I was scared of the friend zone until I realized that's such a shitty thing to be afraid of. Like, oh no, you're such good friends with someone they're not willing to potentially damage your relationship with one another by pushing it further. The friend zone is a good thing. Enjoy platonic love, share that love and relish in it.

In my experience, the friend zone is the result of attraction that’s gone unaddressed and has been overtaken by fantasy. If you spent more time fantasizing about your interactions with a person than you spend actually interacting with them, understand that there’s a good risk that they aren’t on the same page with your fantasies and may feel weirded out by you expressing them as if they were true. Better to be up front early about an attraction imo

I’m ace so I get kinda offended when people act like being friends is a bad thing

It’s a cishet world

This zone thing is fortunately more of a younger person's deal. Mid 40s, here - so not a problem.

For example, my very lovely former coworker just had a baby 2 months ago. I made (CW) BBQ for her and her husband and ran it over tonight to their house. I know how it is with having kids, and that first 6 months new parents don't really leave the house. So I made dinner.

Anyhow, I'd be lying if I said I'm not attracted to her but we really are just friends. I have no idea how she feels about me, and I'm trying to find out since I'm married. We're both married. Point is, I really don't have many friends so I'm happy that she's my friend and vice versa. Today was the best day because I did something nice for her and her dude with no strings attached.

Be happy someone is happy with you in their life on any level.

After reading all these comments...

edit: whoops I forgot about the incel conception of it, that if you're friendly to a woman she'll put you in the "unfuckable" box. Anyone who has dated a friend knows that just isn't true lol.

This is a struggle session tier controversial topic, but "friend zone" is what happens when

(a) you don't want to date someone, but are afraid to reject them completely. A lot of people soften the blow by saying "oh we can still be friends", in the lying polite way you'd say "we should hang out more!" before never following up on it. Especially prevalent among women, because men are dangerous, and especially prevalent when you don't want to rock the boat in a friend group. It's actually quite difficult to be friends with an ex or failed romantic prospect even if both people genuinely do want to be friends; you have to manage strong emotions without being able to directly change them.

(b) the rejected party either doesn't understand or refuses to accept the rejection. Classically, this leads to men trying to "win over" women who don't want them, and honestly probably don't even want to be friends now that the dude is being weird about it, while thinly pretending to just be a good platonic friend. Let me get that door for you mlady.

It's totally legit to want to date someone but not be "just friends" with them. It sucks to lose a friend that way, it's happened to me, but we're all adults here and sometimes people have enough friends already or don't want to be friends with you badly enough to deal with any additional heartache from working through those emotions.