We’ve all heard plenty about the so-called “friend zone”, which is where a person you want to date, just wants to be friends, and somehow that’s unfair and bad and mean.  Let me tell you about its converse, the Un-Friend Zone.

A while back at work, we got a new deskside support/IT guy.  He quickly identified me as the person in the department to talk to, because I know what I’m doing – and what everybody else is doing – with computers (even if they don’t).  We were going through a major hardware and software upgrade at the time, so IT Guy came around a lot.  He and I would get to chatting while he was working, and we discovered we had lots of nerdy things in common.  We really hit it off together.  We started chatting over instant messaging when he wasn’t around in person, and he really brightened slow days for me – and I assume I did the same for him.  I was happy because I don’t make friends easily, and yay, a new friend!  It got to the point where I was considering asking Arb if I could invite him to join our tabletop roleplaying group, because I thought it would be fun to be outside-work friends as well as work-friends.  I was positive it was strictly a platonic thing, because he was at least ten years younger than me, and I’m not conventionally attractive, and he never said anything remotely flirtatious and neither did I.

Then one day, I said the fateful words: “My husband…”  The conversation faltered.  (It’s not like I was keeping Arb a secret, just that I’m not one of those people who’s constantly all “My husband this…” and “My husband that…” and “Well my husband says…” to every opinion offered.)

He didn’t message me the next day like he usually did, so I messaged him.  He was really terse.  I messaged him again a couple days later, same thing.  And the other IT guy started coming for all our deskside support calls.

Ladies and gentleman, behold the Un-Friend Zone: where you think you’re making a new friend, and the other person wants more than friendship, and then when it turns out you don’t feel that way about them, they drop you like a hot potato.  Obviously there can be hurt feelings involved, and that could require some space to get over; I get that.  But on this end of the stick it feels like it wasn’t worth spending time with me and getting to know me, if the payoff isn’t going to be a sexual/romantic relationship.  And that’s crappy.  (It’s not a gendered phenomenon either; Arb has had women do it to him as well.)

I don’t think I have an obligation to be constantly flashing a verbal neon sign that says MARRIED MARRIED MARRIED MARRIED, just in case somebody is attracted to me and I don’t realise it.  On the other hand, I really object when the opening line from a stranger initiating conversation is an inquiry about my sexual availability.  (and yes, this happened to me frequently before I aged/fatted out of the prime fuckability category)  I don’t know what the solution is.  But I wish people who are looking for mates, wouldn’t object to making platonic friends along the way.