Friend-Land! The most pathetic place on earth!

Because my brain won’t stop multitasking today, I came across the following in an entry at Planet Pat:

Many guys, myself included, find this aggravating because you are now instantly in “friend-land” — it’s this mystical place where guys hold out hope for more, but secretly know that this hope actually lands somewhere between “snowball’s chance in hell” and during a table dance at a strip club, the dancer whispers in your ear, “you know, I think you’re a nice guy, let’s go back to my place, make out and bake cookies.”

Mostly it made me laugh, but sparked off another train of thought that’s been on my mind. The entry is discussing that inevitable place you find yourself in when you like someone, and they just see you as a “good friend”. And while I think in a lot of cases that’s very true, I think in others the person is simply using that as nice letdown because they don’t want to tell you that they’re just not into you because that has more potential of killing the friendship outright.

Someone I know uses the term “friend zone” and after a while I thought it’d be better if he removed the “fri-” and said the rest of it. Because it feels like a dead end. Not that everyone’s an attention whore, but sometimes it seems like those “let’s just be friends” moments, whether they’re before a relationship can start or after a relationship is over, are a nice way to say “you can still lavish me with attention and (subdued) affection, just don’t expect the same in return!” As it happens with the “friend zone” person, we did go on a date and my attraction quickly waned after that evening, though he still felt it necessary to let me know of my classification. I thought about it recently as he told me that while we’re still friends, he’s not going to be reading my livejournal anymore — which really amounts to saying “we’re not friends” when the person doesn’t contact you in any other way except for comments on your entries — and I’ve already gone over the reasons behind that in another entry. But moreso, this friend of mine didn’t send me any birthday greetings and that kinda stung because while I don’t have a lot of people’s birthdays memorized, I still get electronic reminders from my own personal calendar as well as myspace and friendster and this year I heard from some people I wasn’t expecting and didn’t hear from others that I was and it was just a little strange.

I feel like I’m rambling now and it’s probably due to hunger, so … lunchtime!