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Setting Them Up and Knocking Them Down: How to Stay Out of the Friend Zone
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I have a friend who just makes girls like him. He's goofy, quirkily attractive, and makes you feel comfortable and deliciously awkward at the same time. He'll grab your hand and race through a mall with you, leaving you laughing and breathless. He'll look into your eyes silently for thirty seconds, then spout out a funny Russian accent. He'll sneak off campus with you during lunch to get ice cream. This guy--let's call him Dallas--sparks a lot of chemistry. Most of our female friends have had crushes on him. A while back, even I did.
But you'll notice I called Dallas my friend, not my boyfriend. A few months after I met him, something in my mind moved him from the crush category to the friend category. About the same time, he started wanting me for more than a friend. My chemistry faded as his grew. What a quandary.
Dallas's problem is that he can "set them up but not knock them down." (It's a bowling analogy. Don't actually set girls up. Or knock them down.) Most people experience the same problem at some point--though few as spectacularly as Dallas--and it ranks as probably the most annoying of love difficulties. You meet someone, they're immediately starstruck. You get to know them and like them more and more as their star-strickenness fades. By the time you're head over heels, they're over you.
So how can you prevent it? How can you keep from moving irreversibly into the friend zone? Easier than Dallas probably knows: treat new friends like possible lovers.
So you're Dallas, and you're meeting a girl for the frist time. She's smart and funny enough for you to want to make friends with her, she's pretty-ish, she's laughing at your jokes. At this point you can either treat her like a guy friend or like the pretty-ish girl she is. You can figure that you'll see her enough around school, or you can ask for her number. You can mostly talk to her at school and over phone or computer, or you can ask her to hang out with you a lot. You can kill the possibility of going out with her, or you can keep your options open for the massive crush that might happen.
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Don't worry too much about leading people on--a phone call is not a promise. Just remember what gender you're attracted to, and treat the people in it like they're part of the gender you're attracted to. It will open up a world of romantic possibilities and close off a world of heartache crushing on your best friend.
Let me break it down for you. When you meet someone with the right gender and orientation, open up a good conversation--see "The Conversation Monster," another story by me. At the end, definitely ask for some contact information, whether it be a number, and e-mail adress, or a screen name. Talk or text or IM or whatever for about a week; if you two are hitting it off, ask them to hang out. Keep talking and hanging out if you decide you just want friendship. If you end up wanting more, step everything up--ask them to hang out alone with you, be more flirtatious, ask them out. Set them up up and knock them down.
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