Romance isn't friendly

Here is the other part of Eliza's missive that I intended to address:

I was friendly, just friendly, with a guy once, at a bar that I go to frequently and at which I have lots of friends (male and female). He friended me on Facebook. We started talking, and we had a lot of the same interests. He was pretty cool, although I wasn't interested in dating him. He asked me to hang out, and I said sure. He then mentioned something about a "date," and I gently but explicitly clarified that I was not interested in dating him or anyone at the moment, but I would be more than happy to hang out as friends. In the same conversation, we decided to just split a bottle of wine at my apartment and chat.

He came over. We were having fun. We were talking about all of our mutual interests. And then he brought up the idea of dating me again.

"I am not trying to be cruel here," I said, "but I want to be clear, to manage expectations. I am not interested in dating you, and that's not going to change."

He threw a temper tantrum.

"I swore off women a few weeks ago," he said, "but I made an exception for you."

Basically, "how dare you not be interested in me when I was interested in you?" Even though I had made it very clear that I was not interested, he had assumed that I still was. He did the right thing, I guess. He didn't give up when I turned him down. But it was pretty revolting, rather than attractive. It was basically the "friendzone" idea - that if a man is interested in a woman, and he is nice to her, and he does all the "right" things, he is entitled to her dating him. If she's not interested, it's because she's a bitch, or friendzoning him, and it's entirely unfair. It's not because, well, she's just not interested. And that's her right. Just because a man "does the right things" doesn't mean he "gets" the girl, like in a video game where if you play it right, you win.

 It's actually not a question of "how dare you not be interested in me when I was interested in you", but rather, "how dare you spend time with me while not being interested in me." If someone is interested in you romantically, and you permit them to go out and spend time with you despite your lack of romantic interest in them, you are being selfish and cruel. That is true of both men and women.

It doesn't matter if you "clarify that you are not interested in dating him or anyone at the moment"; it doesn't take a genius to figure out that "not interested at the moment" is often going to be taken as "maybe in the future", especially by nice guys who have been told their entire lives that if they only hang in there and be themselves, eventually they will be rewarded with True Love from a Good Woman.

That was the cause of the temper tantrum. He had done everything right. And yet, he didn't get the girl.

Eliza is trying to spin this as male entitlement, when really it is nothing but the selfish entitlement of the desired. If you're not interested in dating someone, THEN DON'T GO OUT WITH THEM. Not as friends. Not as anything. Stay home and be lonely, because otherwise what you're doing is using them for companionship, which is every bit as cruel as using someone for sex. Probably crueler, actually, because at least if you're being used for sex, there is a good chance you'll get off on occasion. Of course she would be "more than happy to hang out as friends", because she was more than happy to use him without giving anything he wanted in return.

The friendzone is inherently unfair. It's the desired female counterpart of the male sex stable, in which the desired male keeps the various living sex toys he periodically summons to polish the royal penis in one form or another. As with female emo porn vs male visual porn, society is presently operating under the mistaken impression that women using men for companionship is somehow better than men using women for sex.

It isn't. Using people is wrong, whether one is honest about it or not. Sex slavery and theft don't magically become acceptable simply because the individual committing it is willing to admit that he's guilty of it.

Posted in: Alpha Mail