Friend zone

In popular culture, the friend zone is a situation in which one member of a friendship wishes to enter into a romantic or sexual relationship, while the other does not. It is generally considered to be an undesirable or dreaded situation by the rejected person. The sense of zone is one of being stuck in an unwanted and distant relationship. The rejected person is said to have been put "in" the object of their affection's "friend zone", and this can be verbified, as in the sentence "So, she's friendzoned you."

The concept of the friend zone has been criticized as misogynistic, because of a belief that the concept implies an expectation that women should have sex with men whom they have no interest in, simply because they were nice to them. This is closely associated with so-called "nice guy syndrome".

A Chicago Tribune writer suggested there were a few situations in which someone might become relegated to the friend zone:

Writer Jeremy Nicholson in Psychology Today suggested that when a romantic pursuer, in order to avoid being rejected up front, uses a ploy of friendly acts as a "back door" way in to a hoped-for relationship that this approach rarely works. When it doesn't work, the pursuer consequently finds themselves in the friend zone. (However, see "gender differences" section below.)

The term "friend zone" is sometimes used in pick up artist (PUA) literature, where it forms part of PUA theories about female sexual attraction to males; however, PUA theories are controversial and have been criticised by feminists.

One man likened being "in the friend zone" to being a "" and having only a platonic relationship with a woman. In another instance, a woman described her male friend, someone she was comfortable with as if he was one of her girlfriends, but their relationship became problematic when he wanted their relationship to develop romantically but she did not.

Marshall Fine of The Huffington Post suggested that the friend zone is "like the penalty box of dating, when your only crime is not being buff and unobtainable." Dating adviser Ali Binazir described the friend zone as Justfriendistan, and wrote that it is a:

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