Some Thoughts on the “Friend Zone”

Lancelot and Guinevere, as painted
by Florence Harrison

Let me start by saying the “friend zone” probably exists. I’ve known two women who agreed they’d stuck men in the proverbial friend zone: one who eventually realized her mistake, let him out, and they’re now happily married; the other who eventually realized her mistake, attempted to let him out, and discovered he’d moved on without her (and also he’d previously concealed significant jerkish tendencies). So yes, I believe the friend zone is likely real.

However, its vague, ad hoc definition causes significant problems. Invented in the 1990s on the sitcom Friends, which often reeked of unexamined prejudices, the term often gets applied, mostly by men, to women who don’t adjust their feelings to suit a dude’s whimsy. The term’s subjectivity gives it the potential for toxic application, providing emotional blackmail. It threatens men too, reinforcing the belief that we can’t open up to somebody without having sex with them.

So, if the “friend zone” is real, but naming it is potentially dangerous, how do we handle it? In this case, I’d suggest we examine the unexamined half. We usually consider the “friend zone” as when two people have a strong, reliable friendship, but one participant has unrequited romantic feelings. I suggest we start by considering what “romantic feelings” means. To do that, let’s return to the classic French Romances of the Twelfth Century CE.

No, you needn’t read them to understand my argument. I’ve only read a few, and though they have significant historical value, they’re tedious by today’s standards. Let’s instead entrust our opinions to esteemed critics who make their bones explaining classic literature to us numpties. Though I draw on several such critics, most of today’s commentary will come from C.S. Lewis, because his mix of literary acumen and Anglo-Catholic prudishness gives him a unique blended perspective.

Before the French troubadours, particularly Chrétien de Troyes, we didn’t have any definition of “love” as intense personal feeling. “Love,” according to Lewis, signified either the sense of dutiful devotion married couples and blood kin, or the agape of devout religion. Either people didn’t experience the swooping sensation we now consider “falling in love,” or they left no record. Whichever, couples certainly didn’t marry from an excess of feeling, and didn’t divorce from its absence.

C.S. Lewis

The French troubadours popularized the idea of love through their Romances, a term which literally means “stories in the Roman style.” These poets devised a system they named “courtly love,” a sense of devotion, not to one’s family or one’s people, but to a person, an individual supposedly possessed of virtues and goodness, to whom one devotes a store of feelings. This bestowal of feelings is the origin of what we’d call “falling in love.”

In these poems, the troubadours described what one did with one’s beloved. First, the feeling of love always proceeded from a man to a woman. Because the Romances foregrounded narratives of male valor, the woman consistently got reduced to that man’s mere recipient. A lady, for she must necessarily be well-born and courtly, might receive love from several men simultaneously, but she must never reciprocate. Because what one does with one’s beloved is, ultimately, nothing.

Yes, courtly love is always unrequited. Love, in this formulation, is the longing to be together; if this longing is ever fulfilled, the arc concludes, with nowhere further to go. Thus it’s impossible to love one’s wife. Perhaps the greatest exemplar of “courtly love” is the myth of Dante, who loved Beatrice. Except, by Dante’s own admission, they were only ever in a room together twice in their lives. There’s no evidence they ever spoke.

This matters. The great depth of feeling we call “love” longs for union with the beloved, and simultaneously must never achieve it, because achieving kills the feeling. The overwhelming depths of emotion which drove Sir Lancelot to feats of heroism and poetry depended on him loving Guinevere, but only at great remove. The feeling of frustration men experience when love remains unconsummated wasn’t an error, it was the purpose. Love existed to remain forever incomplete.

Therefore, I suggest, the “friend zone” isn’t a sign that something’s gone wrong in the system. Movies and TV shows which show loving couples coming together have changed the myth to suggest that love exists to bring people together. Yet for medieval Franks, who invented “Romance,” incomplete love was a goal. The “friend zone” was a destination. Imagine how much art and valor we could create, if we recaptured this old, stately sense of “love.”