The Friend Zone Archives - Paging Dr. NerdLove

Episode #74 – How To Escape The Friend Zone

April 26, 2018 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

The question of “how do I get out of The Friend Zone” is among the top Google searches out there when it comes to relationship advice. The idea of the Friend Zone as a sort of dating Stalag-17 has driven more people into the Pick Up and Red Pill community than almost any other topic.

For a lot of guys, the Friend Zone is the ultimate expression of the dating binary: you’re good with women or you aren’t, and there’s nothing that you can do about it.

So this week: there’s no BS, no snake oil and no creepy, manipulative tactics. Just everything you need to know about why you’re in The Friend Zone… and how to get out of it.

Show Highlights:

What most men don’t understand about The Friend Zone
How you ended up in The Friend Zone in the first place
Why the way most people try to leave The Friend Zone never works
What you need to do to change the nature of your relationship from platonic to sexual
The number one mistake men make when trying to escape The Friend Zone

…and so much more

Why Men and Women Can Never Be Friends is Bullshit

Anatomy Lesson: How I Left The Friend Zone

How To Be “Just Friends”

Avoiding The Friend Zone

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How To Get Out Of The Friend Zone (Without Losing Your Friend)

September 25, 2015 by Dr. NerdLove 287 Comments

Normally, on Fridays I like to answer readers’ dating questions. However, occasionally I’ll receive a question that merits a full article, something that has wider interest than the specific circumstances of the question. This week, we have just such a question.

And it involves The Friend Zone1

We’ve talked about avoiding the Friend Zone in the first place by behaving like a potential lover, rather than a friend. We’ve even talked about how to try to reframe a purely platonic relationship into a potentially sexual one. But one of the things we haven‘t discussed are the mechanics of actually making that leap. What do you do when you’ve finally screwed up the courage to tell your special someone how you feel? How do you even bring it up? How do you handle the potential fallout?

It’s a tricky maneuver, and one that carries serious risks to your relationship as it currently stands. But without risk, there is no reward.

Let’s break it down, shall we?

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Standard disclaimer: there is no friend-zone, there are just people who want to date or sleep with you and people who don’t. The terminology is used here merely as a term of convenience. [↩]

How To Pick Up Women In Your Social Circle

August 3, 2015 by Dr. NerdLove 577 Comments

A few days ago, a friend of mine told the story of how a random guy tried to pick her up over Facebook. The only thing they had in common before he tried to slide into her DMs like yeah were that both of them were members of the same Facebook group; up until that point, they had never so much as exchanged two words in the comments on a post.

Pictured here: how dudes see themselves on social media. — Pictured here: how men hitting on strangers see themselves on social media.

Needless to say, she wasn’t thrilled.

In fact, over the course of telling this story, other women came forward with stories of random guys who would roll into social gatherings – not just social media groups, but in-person events like MeetUp groups – like it was two-for-one night at the local singles bar. This, of course, resulted in more women feeling uncomfortable in these groups and eventually leaving them altogether.

Now, I’ve long recommended a number of social events as places to meet women outside of bars and clubs… but it doesn’t do any good if your approach drives people away. There are many, many places to meet awesome women in your day-to-day life from classrooms to conventions, but you need to know how to do it the right way.

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Anatomy Lesson: Escaping The Friend Zone

May 6, 2013 by Dr. NerdLove 248 Comments

Over the last couple of years, we’ve been talking about how to improve your dating life, from making yourself look better, improving your ability to approach and charm friends and strangers, fixing the attitudes and self-limiting beliefs that hold you back and even how to find more sex. However, while it’s good to learn about each individual aspect of attraction, dating and self-improvement, you need to be able to blend them all together. After all, getting better at dating is a holistic system rather than simply applying each of the component parts one at a time.

However, trying to apply everything all at once can feel overwhelmingly complicated. It helps to have some context in which you can see how everything merges seamlessly. So with that in mind, the Doc is getting back on the examining table to study another incident from his life to see how to put all of these lessons together. It’s time for another Anatomy Lesson.

"And this, children, is where a player's 'swag' is generated..." — “And this, children, is where a player’s ‘swag’ is generated…”

And this time, it’s a story of how I escaped the Friend Zone.

We’re going to look at how I took a decades-long platonic relationship and went from “just friends” to so much more – and more importantly, we’re going to break down WHY what I did worked… and how you can relate it to your own experiences.

Some obligatory ass-covering – this has been approved by all parties involved. Certain details have been changed to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent.

And so I give you: The Great Escape.

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The Problem With “Nice Guys”

December 17, 2012 by Dr. NerdLove 989 Comments

I always appreciate it when a topic for an article happens to fall into my lap. It saves me all of the time and anxiety that comes with writing a thrice-weekly column that usually culminates with the 3 AM insomnia-inducing panic that leads to my brain screaming “I HAVE RUN OUT OF IDEAS!” as I try to force inspiration into my face through judicious prescriptions of Macallan from my good friend Dr. Whiskey all the while cursing my laptop for betraying me by not magically producing the pages that the DMT elves promised me.

"WHY DO YOU BETRAY MY TRUST?!" — In fairness, that really only happens every other day…

In this case, the kernel of an article came to me via Twitter as one of my readers linked me to a post on Tumblr with a rant and blistering response between a “Nice Guy” and one of the many women who bought into the “Nice Guy” schtick. The issue of the “Nice Guy” is one that is close to my cold, mercenary heart if only because I’ve spent so much time in that mindset and every “I’ve been friendzoned” rant brings familiar echoes of ones that I wrote myself and broadcast to the uncaring world wide web – ones that fortunately have been lost to the universe, never to be seen again1

As much as the issue of the Nice Guy forever continues to rise, phoenix-like from the ashes of self-destructing friendships, as someone who has been there, done that and literally printed the t-shirt (another college experiment that has been destroyed) I feel the need to educate my Nice Guy brethren as to just what the big fucking problem is with the Nice Guy world view and just why it’s so goddamn toxic.

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