By: Ana Qarri

 

Put your hand up if you like someone. Put your other hand up if they don’t like you back. Now worm out of your seat and fall on the floor if “you’re great,” but they “just don’t see you that way.”

Lay there.

Welcome to the Friend Zone. Our motto is, “You’ll never find love in this hopeless place,” and our favourite pastime is living in a constant state of denial. We like to wallow in self-perpetuated sadness, while making no efforts to leave this zone of obsessive behaviour and overly friendly gestures. We’re usually found next to our close friend, being hilarious, throwing compliments around like they ain’t no thing, and being excessively pleasant in general.

Honestly, we’re a catch.

Firstly, as a representative of this very sad community, I would like to ask: Why? Why do you smile at us as if you aren’t thinking about making out under a tree somewhere behind Hamilton Hall? Why do you ask us out to dinner if it doesn’t involve a shared spaghetti scene straight out of Lady and The Tramp? And finally, if we’re so great that you want to spend every waking moment with us and tell us about your whole life, why not just sweep us into your (perfect) arms?

The friend zone can be awkward, and this is an understatement. You try not to stare, but sometimes, you just have to. Don’t blame yourself. Staring at people is a compliment – a very creepy compliment. You try to act completely unfazed when your hands touch, but that’s followed by the terrible realization that you probably aren’t a great actor. Your heart really needs to stop beating so loudly, and if your obsession wasn’t already tragically obvious, it probably becomes so when you reply to their texts within the nanosecond.

Finding yourself in the Friend Zone can be devastating. It’s a barren land, yet one thing remains: Hope.

Hope is the driving force of the Friend Zone. Hope is what makes it so heartbreaking, so difficult to leave. If you find yourself in the friend zone, recall the Myth of Sisyphus. You are Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill, and when you’re almost there, when you think they finally want to hold your hand and share the weight, the rock falls back down to the bottom. And you push it up, again and again. It might be heavy, but you know you can’t stop. You still have Hope.

The question is: Is Hope good or bad? Is it okay to have Hope in situations like this?

Of course, we regard hope as a great thing. Hope is perhaps humanity’s greatest tool – it is its motivator for change, a reason to live, to survive. Yet the Ancient Greeks would like to disagree. They generally thought that Hope was an evil. Hope is associated with expectation, which when unfulfilled can be devastating, especially if it occurs repeatedly. While Hope keeps you going, an excess of Hope could leave you defeated. It could lead to days (perhaps even weeks) of watching bad reality TV shows, eating buckets of ice cream and Nutella, and wiping your tears with No Name brand tissues.

So, in the end, it’s up to you. Hope or not, the Friend Zone rarely has any secret passageways to the Zone. Sadness is only temporary, but clinging on to possible scenarios, hoping that maybe another you in another universe is cuddling with the cutest human ever, will only prolong it.

The Friend Zone can be hard to understand. Its outcomes are never certain. It could make you upset and angry. It could hurt your feelings, or you could be one of the lucky few who manage to push that rock over the hill and come out victorious. Truth is, you’ll never really know until you try.

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