Jess lanai

I went through about a half a year period where all I would read was H.P Lovecraft.

It wasn’t that I was into his genre (horror) it was that he had a way of describing things that I’d never seen before and was very struck by.

He was a skilled writer and when someone is a skilled writer I like to try to find records of their progress.

I want to see what they wrote before they had skill. Which means I go to significant lengths to find their earliest writing.

H. P Lovecraft started in nonfiction.

He wrote a lot of essays.

Basically, he wrote a lot of articles where he shared his rather pompous opinion on things.

He was so opinionated that it was difficult to read. I don’t remember what his opinions were only that they gave me a similar feeling to reading angry male Reddit posts.

The opinions were so obnoxious that I pretty much zoned out. They weren’t even offensive. They were sad. So black and white I just felt pity for a man that had never seen color.

What held my interest in reading his essays was watching him lighten up. He actually did change his mind quite a few times. He softened up on a lot of things. He did, in his own way, develop.

Many things he strongly supported he later showed regret and shame in the support them.

And many things he was completely against he opened up to.

His opinions gained some complexity and nuance over time and life experience.

Which is what I hope to do with this blog.

I haven’t reread anything I’ve posted. So I don’t know how many times I’ve contradicted myself or changed my mind without even realizing I changed my mind.

But with this post I do know that I’ve changed my mind on the subject of friend zoning men.

And I’ve changed it because I got more information.

I’ll be thirty five this year. I’m currently single. Do I like being single?

No. Not at all.

What do I hate about being single? Many things.

But what I’ve always especially hated about being single was the being considered available.

I hate being available.

I hate being available because I hate rejecting people.

Rejecting people I like is especially awful.

And I like a lot of men.

Men are fun.

They are funny creatures. At first most of them act all stiff and serious but once they relax they’re goofy and mischievous and smart and very emotionally complex.

They’re also extremely loyal, they go out of their way to be helpful and in certain areas they are more logical than women. So they are pretty wonderful to have as friends.

But they are also very difficult to be friends with. Because they also have a lot of ego and they have a lot of drive towards goals and they have needs that I do not have and so cannot understand.

And all of that can get put on me if they develop a crush.

I have a strict policy about never unfriend zoning a man I have already friend zoned. To me it is an eternal sentence.

For a long time I didn’t know why I have such an aversion to ever being with a man that I was first friends with. But at 34 I’m starting to understand the inner workings of what puts a man in the friend zone.

I’ve always thought the reason I friend zone a man had to do with a lack of attraction.

Which in a way yes, that’s true.

But there is a very specific reason for the lack of attraction that isn’t as complex as I think I made it seem in earlier friend zone posts.

As a woman I’ve gone through a lot of stages in how I behave towards men.

In stage one I was cripplingly shy and had trouble saying no.

In stage two I over corrected and turned into a super bitch.

In stage three I had a lot of man friends and developed a lot more empathy for men.

In my current stage, stage four, I understand men better and therefore feel quite a bit of guilt when I have to reject them.

Rejecting a man is hard to do. If a man is respectful and genuine about it’ll sometimes sting as much or more than getting rejected myself.

Then I might spend some time running myself through my own head wondering why I’m not attracted and why my immediate instinct is no.

And if it’s wrong. That immediate instinct. If I should challenge it or test it out and not be so quick to shut everything down.

But that idea, the idea of challenging it, makes my body feel very heavy and it becomes not worth the weight.

And that’s the truth. It’s not worth it.

Going out with a man I’m not attracted to that already really likes me is not worth it.

This is what sometimes men do not understand.

Getting involved with a man is risky.

The more intense the man’s feelings the more risky it is.

Especially when men haven’t yet gone through rejection and learned how to process it. Men have very, very strong emotions and incredibly strong impulses.

I’m risking being held somewhat responsible for those intense emotions and impulses when I get deeply involved with a man.

And by responsible I mean empathy will develop and I’ll care. Even to my own detriment I might care. I might even care so much that I deny reality and my own happiness in the process of taking on the responsibility of caring.

And sometimes that is what men are asking for when they ask to escape the friend zone. They’re asking for the woman to develop a level of caring that overwrites everything else.

Which, honestly, happens to a lot of women.

In the last few years I’ve been very careful not to have any man friends at all.

By that I mean I never hang out with men unless I’m with a friend and her husband.

I have a few old guy friends that I’ve known for a decade or more that I talk to on the phone now and then. Then I have my male coworkers. And I have my brother. I treasure having good guys to work with and good guys to talk to now and then and an incredible brother.

Because men are really just so much fun and so incredibly comforting to have around.

And I’ve sort of come to realize over some time how important it is to have male friends. And for men to have female friends.

I think I got, what’s the term, red pilled? I’m actually not sure what that means. I think red pilled means just having more extreme conservative type view on how men and women should behave.

And getting sort of caught up in the hierarchy of it all.

That’s why writing can be good for people. There’s a lot of thoughts and ideas that kind of get put in our brains that really need to be edited out.

Like the idea that men and women can’t be friends.

I wrote this post to sort of correct myself. Because in my last two friend zone posts I feel I may have discouraged friendships between men and women.

That should be corrected.

I have benefited so much from having male friends.

And men especially can benefit from having female friends. Women friends give men a better attitude on women and more importantly real information on women.

Women deeply care about their friends so they actually try to help men meet women. Women will help men process rejection from women. Women also help men identify toxic women.

Women help men know when their ego is blocking the solution which for a lot of guys can mean incredible advancement.

‘Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror.’

‘At the mountains of madness’

H.P Lovecraft