It's pretty easy. Just be their friend. In my experience as a boring straight man, my women friends have gotten me laid more than I have myself. When you make friends, you make more friends. Ask them to hook you up with someone single.

Friends are nice to have. And it's ok if someone isn't interested in you. Move on, fuck their friends. lol

The entire concept of friend zone is just the obvious display of the emotional stuntedness and hyper-ingrained mysogyny that are the hallmarks of the empty husks men are turned into in this culture. Anybody using the concept of "the friendzone" is incapable of forming actual bonds to other people and sees women as nothing but fuck machines, i'm not buying any other explanation for this garbage.

I had written out a long effortpost earlier today, about how ridiculous this concept seems from a queer, particularly transbian, poly and acespec point of view, how people who are actually capable of more complex and nuanced relationships than "bro" and "longterm monogamous fuckmeat" may view this, and it was pretty good actually. It got into a lot of the emotional complexities of having to navigate the depths of friendship and dating as a queer woman, how difficult it can be to draw a line between very intimate friendship and romantic and / or sexual and / or sensual attraction when you have social relations that lack the distance, rudeness, shallow affect and fear of tenderness that are the hallmarks of the deeply damaged masculine condition, and it did get a lot into how all the emotional wealth that comes from that in all my relationships is worth the confusion of the condition we describe as "useless lesbian", which is what the community calls a person like me who is incapable of telling where the normal amount of teasing and compliments and displays of affection between girls ends and where genuine flirting starts. And it had a whole paragraph about how it's ok and normal to remain friends with people you've had sex with, how it can actually deepen instead of "ruin" a friendship to know sides of each other you don't show to anybody. How liberating it is to ditch monogamous notions of relationships as a form of possession that leads to an inherently brutalized and competitive way to engage with other human beings. How complex and layered the range of things you can feel for people can be if you're somewhere on the asexual spectrum and hornyness isn't constantly clouding the rest of your feelings and sex isn't all about fucking, how much of this thread is dominated by a mindset of a cishet allo mononormative ideal of relationships where the straights all get told all day by mass culture how to feel and none of them have to make sense of their feelings and their desires to the same extend queer people have and how much poorer straight people are for being trapped in that kind of prescriptive disneyfied themepark version of sexuality.

But the site crashed when i tried to send it because on top of ruining hexbear culture, this whole federation garbage has also wrecked site performance. If this dumpster fire of a thread is any indication, good luck with how this place is going to develop, because i do not see myself on here much longer when the main goal of hexbear is onboarding as many cishet dudes as possible. This shit is so gross, i pitty anybody who has no choice but date men.

It's simple: just don't be bothered by something that's bothering you

This whole struggle session has made it crystal clear that the west is pretty much guaranteed to descend into fascism. A lot of people basically seem to knee-jerk dismiss concerns people have about being in the friend zone, and without a legitimate leftist response to this, tons of alienated young men are going to find their way to reactionary figures and basically become the foot soldiers of fascism. There needs to be more concrete help for these alienated guys other than saying "it's all capitalism's fault that you feel that way" or saying "oh you even mention the friend zone? tHaT mEaNs YoU'rE aN iNcEl!" I mean yes capitalism has really alienated us and commodified dating but that's not gonna help the lonely guy who gets rejected all the time other than in an intellectual way. Also telling him that "you should just be content with life" is also not helpful either. I mean yeah you can be all Buddhist about it but would you say that to other disenfranchised people as well? "Hey sorry about the discrimination but it's better to just be content with life." Is this what an AES nation would do? Sounds like some idealist western shit rather than a principled materialist approach that takes into account the realities on the ground. The USSR industrialized, developed, and got rid of cyclical famines. China lifted millions out of poverty. They didn't just say "it's capitalism's fault that you're homeless" and then just leave it at that, they actually did concrete stuff. There needs to be concrete action done to deal with this issue other than mockery/dunking or simple platitudes like "hey just be yourself and be content."

Anyways, like I've said before, the west is doomed.

Relationships are hard and people have all sorts of fucked up expectations of what a partner is and hang ups about communicating. I'm not in my 20s anymore and I'm just starting to explore the craft of remediating friendships/relationships. When I was younger, I had to discover sympathy for not wanting to fuck up a friendship because I cut people out so much more easily than I explain how inappropriate someone is acting. I would tear through a friendship turned relationship when they criticize me for something I don't feel is worthy of criticism and it's RIP Bozo for what we had before. This shit still makes me consider whether I'm aromantic because I'm prepared to just be alone rather than try to make a relationship work. A good friend can be a shitty room mate. If you're the shitty room mate and your friend wants to move in together that shit would be heartbreaking to hear because you'd need to immediately start processing the loss.

You should always say in no uncertain terms that you're into someone and play that hand. You have the one life to live and I imagine some people are happier in relationships. As long as you don't start a platonic friendship as a wolf in sheep's clothing, it's all fair game as I see it. If you decide that your newly grown feelings aren't reciprocated and you stop making an effort, whatever. If you don't bother to know them better after you confess from the get go, whatever. If you can keep newfound feelings to yourself and never confess, fair enough. There aren't rules to relationships. A wolf in sheep's clothing is the only thing that is bad manner.