Say I lower my standards and give in to your incessant asking. We go out for dinner and a movie. Preferably not a romantic comedy since I hate those. We talk, we realize we have lots of superficial things in common like our mutual love of Star Wars, Harry Potter and spicy food.
We talk on the phone every night. You text in the middle of the day just to ask how I’m doing. I post cute, funny things on your Facebook timeline. Things progress. We hold hands in your car. We start dating exclusively.
It’s exciting and fun at first. We go on adventures in the wilderness and make burned cookies in your kitchen. You tell me you love me, and I say I love you too. Our friends joke about us getting married. I think your friends are awesome. And we think for the first few months that everything is perfect.
But all those standards I compromised in the beginning start to resurface.
I say I accept all your flaws but I’m lying. Because while we have a blast together, you are nowhere near the image of you I have made up in my mind. So you do things that are simply in your nature to do. It’s not me, it’s you. But it’s my fault because I knew from the start that you were no good for me but I went ahead and went out with you anyway.
We start to fight, a lot. You call me high-maintenance. I call you insensitive. But we make up, for a while. Until those things, which of course will never go away, show up over and over again. All the awesome things we used to do seem to just fade away.
It comes to a point where being together seems more like unpleasant work than the easy relationship it was at the beginning. I become withdrawn and distant, so you start flirting with a co-worker. I find out and blow my top. We fight until I’m emotionally and physically exhausted. This lasts for weeks until I decide that I just can’t go on like this anymore, so we break up.
We awkwardly try to maintain some semblance of friendship for the first couple of months. Until you start dating someone else (probably the co-worker you were flirting with) soon after, which hurts me and I tell you so. You accuse me of being clingy and point out that it was I who broke things off.
So I force myself to let you go. Once in a while you text me and ask how I’m doing but I don’t reply because I don’t see the point in staying friends with you. Once in a while I still check your Facebook page. I find out from one of your friends that you cheated on me while we were together. There are so many things I want to say but it’s been almost a year and really, I can’t think of a single good thing that could come out of staying in contact with you. Instead, I choose to move on.
So yeah. When I put you in the friend zone, it’s because I don’t want you to become just another person who was once a part of my life. Being friends is so much easier than going through all of that and then just ending up as strangers anyway. Standards are there for a reason. Just because someone makes a good friend does not automatically mean they’ll make a good mate for you. And now, I’ve experienced enough to tell the difference.
