Don’t fear the friend zone
For many men, especially those who consider themselves part of the online “red pill” or “black pill” communities, there is no worse fate in life than finding oneself in a “friend zone” relationship with a desirable woman.
For the red pill community, named after a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix, women automatically sort all men into either the “alpha” (romantic interest) category or the “beta” (nonromantic friend) category. A surefire way of ending up in the nonromantic category, according to the red pill way of thinking, is to treat women with too much kindness, which they believe signals low mate value and lack of confidence. The takeaway is that men should avoid being kind to women they are romantically interested in, lest they be placed in the friend category.
For the black pill community, women are also perceived as automatically sorting all men into two categories, “high value” and “low value.” But the sorting has less to do with how men treat women and more to do with men’s physical attractiveness. A man is either physically attractive to a woman, or he is not, and there is nothing he can do about it. Black pill adherents see no way out of the inevitable friend zone and believe in simply withdrawing from dating entirely.
Both communities don’t understand what women look for in a romantic partner and underestimate how many successful couples start out as friends.
According to a recent survey of university students in the United States and Canada, the vast majority of couples (66%) actually started out as friends, averaging about 22 months in the friend zone before turning the corner into a romantic relationship. The same survey found that “a friendship turning romantic” was far and away the preferred way of beginning a romantic relationship among men and women.
It is not that physical attractiveness is not important to women, although it is far less important to women than it is to men. However, for long-term relationships, women prioritize other traits such as dependability, emotional stability, ambition, education, and, most importantly, kindness.
IF YOU WANT MORE CHILDREN, YOU ARE GOING TO NEED MORE MARRIAGE
This does not mean that any one woman owes any one man anything for being kind to her. But if a self-confident and self-sufficient man is kind to the women in his life and gradually forms stable friendships with them, many of those women who did not immediately see that man as a romantic possibility are likely to do so over time.
For the sake of full disclosure, my wife and I were friends for just over a year before I asked her out on a date during our sophomore year in college. We’ve been together ever since, so I highly recommend the friend-to-wife romantic route.
