This post was written by Jordan Casomar, author of How to Lose a Best Friend.
If there was one singular message I’d hope readers take away from this novel, it’s this: Everyone deserves to beloved but no one deserves someone’s love.
By which I mean, everyone comes into the world with a heart and mind that deserves to be recognized, cared for, and cherished, but that doesn’t mean that you deserve that investment of time, energy, and intention from a specific person just because you want it to be that way.
The friendzone is, at its core, rooted in the belief that you deserve love from a particular person, even—or especially—when they don’t feel the same way. It doesn’t matter if the other person is in a different phase of their life and are disinterested in dating. It doesn’t matter if they’re hungrier for friendship than they are romance. It doesn’t matter what they say or want. All that matters is what you feel you deserve.
Adherents of the myth of the friendzone often think that all it takes is the right body, the right clothes, the right words, the right actions. If you can just figure out the right way to make it happen, you’ll because that person can be a potential partner if you can just figure out the right way to make it happen. But the fact of the matter is that love and attraction and romantic impulses are strange and fickle. Sometimes it clicks, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s wonderful when it does, but when it doesn’t, friendzone devotees often believe that someone’s at fault, either they themselves, the person that spurned them, or both.
All of this I know from personal experience. For a long time, I was a firm believer in the friendzone. There was a girl I met in high school that I fell for, hard. I made my life revolve around her. I did anything I thought she wanted me to do. I became anyone I thought she wanted me to be. And when she still wasn’t interested, because she was never interested in me that way, I became angry. Angry at her, yes, but angry at myself most of all.
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I thought I hated myself for how “nice” I had been, and for what? I thought I hated myself for how unattractive I was as I stared at my body in the mirror and the clothes in my closet with disgust. It took me a long, long time to realize the truth, which was that I just simply hated myself, which had absolutely nothing to do with her. I hated myself and I thought that if she wanted me and loved me, I wouldn’t have to hate myself anymore. I would know that I deserved to be loved because someone else chose to love me, saving me from the much harder work of learning to love myself.
See, I believe that the strongest defense against the enduring and insidious myth of the friendzone is recognizing and believing you deserve to be loved. That is to say, in loving yourself. The very idea of the friendzone—that someone has put you somewhere you don’t want to be—hinges on someone giving excess weight or importance to the actions and reactions of another person.
In the novel, Zeke, the protagonist, is not as far gone as I was. His vision of himself is healthier, more balanced. But, like my younger self, he still doesn’t see his life as complete or enough in and of itself. Zeke’s happiness is tied to Imogen, the novel’s deuteragonist, saying yes to him and his advances. And, as was the case for my younger self, when things don’t go exactly as Zeke planned, when he doesn’t get the happy ending he feels he deserves, ruin follows. But Imogen, she finds herself. She finds her power. She finds the parts of herself that she loves most and, in so doing, decides that she deserves to be loved the way she wants to be loved.
In writing this novel and exploring the conflict between Zeke and Imogen, I spent a lot of time thinking about the boy I was, the man I am now, and everything that happened in between. I wanted to write a novel that looked at both sides, at both the pursuer and the pursued, and the stress and pain and confusion that arise when people confuse deserving to be loved with deserving someone’s love. The end result is, I hope, a testament to the importance of that distinction and the importance of understanding and caring for yourself without needing validation from someone else.
Get your copy of How to Lose a Best Friend by Jordan Casomar here.