What to do when you've been Friend Zoned

If you’re a fan of flying, you might be familiar with a holding pattern, which is when an aircraft circles in the air while it’s waiting for permission to land at an airport. And if you’ve ever had friends, or lovers, or friends who you wish were lovers, you might be familiar with the idea of the “Friend Zone.” The Friend Zone is an imagined space, similar to a holding pattern, where people hang out while they’re waiting for their crush to notice them, to feel the same way they do, or to reject them from romantic consideration. It’s not a real place, but it involves real feelings. The big question is: how do you get out of the Friend Zone?

Is it a real friendship or the Friend Zone?

“Friends to lovers” is a popular rom-com trope for a reason—everyone loves a happy ending. It’s common and normal for two people to be genuine friends and then gradually develop feelings for each other, but sometimes that doesn’t happen for both friends at the same time, or it may not happen for one of you at all. Unreciprocated romantic feelings can be difficult to navigate, especially in a long-term friendship.

If the friendship began with one person already secretly harboring a crush on the other, that might be unfair to the unsuspecting friend who believes that the relationship was always platonic on both ends. Even if you can’t be honest with your friend about how you feel, then it helps to be honest with yourself about your motives for remaining in what could potentially be a one-sided relationship. The key to getting out of the Friend Zone could be the realization that the foundation was never a real friendship, just an opportunity to get closer to your crush. Remember—true friendship requires honesty and reciprocity for it to work.

Who put whom in the Friend Zone?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard or said, “They put me in the Friend Zone.” In other words, if you’re not their lover, then your friend or crush has placed you in the Friend Zone.

But you could look at this two ways: the Friend Zone could be a place your crush created for you or it could be a place you put yourself. But how can you put yourself in the Friend Zone, you might be wondering. By not seeing yourself as a worthy or potential lover/partner for your heartthrob. If you’ve ever thought, “I’m not their type, they’d never want to date me, they only see me as a friend,” without having had that conversation with your friend, you could be Friend Zoning yourself. Approaching a crush can be hard, but you’ve got to give yourself a chance in order for them to give you one.

So how do you get out of the Friend Zone?

Remember that holding pattern we talked about earlier? When you’re stuck in it, you’re going around in a loop that takes you nowhere. You can’t go backward, and you can’t move forward. That may be the biggest reason why the Friend Zone sucks so much, because it makes you feel stuck in your crush’s orbit, unable to act on the energy that keeps you drawn to them.

You may feel stuck, but you don’t have to stay stuck. The lie of the Friend Zone is that your love interest is the one with all the control, since they can either give you the go ahead to come in for a landing or tell you to find another airport altogether.

But in fact, you also have choices to make, because you get to decide how you want to handle the situation. If you want to leave the Friend Zone, you have to either give up and walk away without shooting your shot or take the risk and tell your friend that you have feelings for them. Bringing your feelings out into the open gives both of you the opportunity to make a decision about your friendship with all of the facts laid bare.

So what happens if you confess your feelings, and your crush doesn’t want anything about your relationship to change? Faced with a crush that has no way to fully blossom, you may decide to move on from the friendship. If it feels painful or unfair to you to continue pouring energy into a one-sided relationship, eventually resentment may grow and destroy the friendship. However, if you do want to stay friends, it’s possible your feelings for them can shift from romantic back to platonic. Either way, you’ll be out of the dreaded Friend Zone and free to fall in love with someone else.