How do i get a girlfriend

>You say " friends to lovers route" but what's the alternative? I thought that the friend zone thing was just a meme.
No, friendzoning is a real thing that really happens, or at least it's a useful way of describing the problem that many guys face when they try to go after a girl after becoming regular friends.
I'll lay out a couple scenarios that explain the problem with friends-to-lovers.

First scenario:
>John meets Jane, thinks she's a neat girl and pretty, but isn't sure how he feels about her. So he decides to get to know her better as a friend so he can decide whether he wants to date her formally.
>Jane quickly becomes John's sole social focus in life, and he pays no attention to any other women. When he gets her number they start texting daily. John feels like he's gotten to know her very well and becomes enamored with her over the course of the next few months. He feels great about this friendship and wants to take it to the next level.
>John finally musters up the courage to ask Jane out. Either he confesses his feelings for her like in some high school romantic comedy anime series, or he asks her out on a one-on-one date. Jane turns him down, and he's heartbroken. She says she only sees him as a friend.
What happened here? A couple things. First, Jane likely didn't find John attractive in the first place. So John has wasted several months of his life pursuing a friendship with a girl to whom he was attracted, and not pursuing other girls, only to find out that she wasn't interested. Attraction is the essential precondition to anything happening, and really, John should have recognized that he was attracted to her in the beginning... the problem was that he mistook "not knowing if he would fall in love" (which is rational) for "not knowing if he was attracted". The fact that he wanted to know her better to see if he would want to date her means he found her attractive.

Continued...

Of course, it's possible that a girl's perception of a guy will change in time, but closeness/proximity almost always prevents that from producing attraction. So even if, for instance, John had also spent those months losing 50 pounds of fat, gaining 25 pounds of muscle, getting a $150k/year job, and becoming a pillar of the community, he would still look the same to Jane as he had when they first met.

Second scenario (not friends-to-lovers):
>John meets Jane, thinks she's a neat girl and pretty, but doesn't know her that well. So he decides to get to know her better. He asks her if she wants to get coffee together later in the week. She agrees.
>John and Jane meet for coffee and talk about a lot of things. John makes a couple of passes flirtationwise and at the end tries to set up a second date.
>Jane says "No thanks," because she just didn't find John attractive. John is disappointed, but not crushed.
>The next day John goes to get coffee with Judy, another girl he'd met and thought was cute but didn't know all that well. After having their coffee and talking, John knows a bit more about Judy and that hasn't killed his attraction, so he asks for a second date/hangout. Judy agrees.
>John and Judy go on more dates together and as they get to know each other better, their mutual feelings build. Eventually they become a couple.
I'm leaving out a lot of critical details (i.e., the mechanics of dating) but it's not really relevant to what I'm trying to illustrate here.
The point is that you are supposed to do the "getting to know each other" and "figuring out your feelings" *through* dating. Becoming regular friends first to discover if your attraction is something that could become more is the wrong process, and leads to the guy incorrectly committing to the girl when he doesn't even know if she's attracted.

Continued...

From a practical standpoint, compare the two scenarios this way: The first took months just to figure out if Jane was attracted. In the second, John found out within a week, and was able to move on because he wasn't committed to a single girl at that point.

And that's not to say Judy is a "fallback girl", nor that Jane was a "practice girl". Not at all. John had attraction for both, and efficiently sought to resolve either attraction case without a substantial amount of downtime.

It's entirely possible to have a few dates with a girl for her to realize she's not that into you, or for you to realize you don't care that much for her. Pipelining prospects means there's less downtime after a rejection, so the cost of rejection is a lot lower.

Now this is critical: In some sense, the first date—the coffee date in the second scenario—is "becoming friends". You aren't asking her on a formal date when you get coffee together: it's just hanging out and getting coffee, getting to know each other better. But that's the beauty of it: It still functions as a date, but without all the pressure of calling it a date or doing formal "datey" things.
Pressure clouds the mind and can make either party make irrational decisions, like not go for the date despite the presence of attraction. That's actually partly what I believe people are going for when they say "friendzoning"; the pressure of risking a friendship could cause the girl to make an irrational decision in the face of some nugget of attraction. The reality, though, is that in the vast majority of cases the girl simply isn't attracted in the first place, and you've wasted weeks, months, sometimes years just to find that out.

Continued...

None of this is to say that the friendship that you form with a girl who ultimately isn't attracted to you isn't valuable. But when you enter it (or increase its intensity, which is probably more what happens in most cases) because of attraction, you're setting yourself up to waste a ton of time for something that, even if it did result in a relationship, could fail in moments.

This happened to me, though I was sort of on the receiving end. I had a close friend for years who, after a gap in contact, started intensifying her level of contact with me. I had always had a little attraction for her, but didn't go for it because I didn't think she felt the same way, and since it would've been long distance, I pursued girls closer to me. Eventually, one day, we had a fight, after which she basically admitted to being in love with me. I said I liked her too, and that set off a whirlwind of a romance...
...that completely collapsed and burned after a month, ending both the relationship and friendship.

Fact of the matter is, no matter how close you are as friends, becoming lovers is different, and maintaining a relationship is more different still. There are tons of places and issues that come up in relationships that are complete non-issues between friends. And I don't just mean sex shit. For instance, with my ex, my career decisions were constantly on her mind and causing her to panic. Another thing was meeting her parents; while it went amazingly well for me, it's fraught with a lot of speedbumps that wouldn't be an issue if we were just friends.

These are excellent posts, thank you. I have a better understanding now. I feel the real challenge however is putting this knowledge into practice.
Thank you my man.

>Of course, it's possible that a girl's perception of a guy will change in time, but closeness/proximity almost always prevents that from producing attraction. So even if, for instance, John had also spent those months losing 50 pounds of fat, gaining 25 pounds of muscle, getting a $150k/year job, and becoming a pillar of the community, he would still look the same to Jane as he had when they first met.

Why the heck is that? That doesn't seem to make sense.

>a whirlwind of a romance...
>...that completely collapsed and burned after a month, ending both the relationship and friendship.

Wanna give some details?

It has to do with proximity and continuity of contact. Like how it's easy not to notice how dirty your carpeting has gotten until you move around furniture and see the original color underneath, in stark contrast.

Using the same analogy, if you were to be in the house when the carpeting was originally installed, leave, and then come back ten years later, you would notice how dirty it had gotten.

You also get this with weight loss; it's hard to notice that you've lost weight from day to day looking in the mirror, but when you see a picture of yourself before and after, it's shocking.

People you're close to, that you see every day, that you interact with every day, have difficulty seeing gradual shifts, and their perception of you as "different" is based on day-to-day changes, which are very small. A girl's appreciation of you is not going to change very much despite your improvement if she's there the whole time.

be chad

/thread

>I feel the real challenge however is putting this knowledge into practice.
Tinder revolutionized my move from the friends-to-lovers model to the pipelining model. The whole deal of having to balance the match-to-contact-to-coffee cycle between more than one girl at the same time (since as you wait more time from match to contact and from contact to coffee, the failure rate goes up exponentially) is a real eye-opener.

Getting from first contact to coffee is shockingly easy. In real life, it's only slightly more delicate, but it is the only functional system for regular relationship building (i.e., not ending in the friendzone, and not PUA shit where the only goal is no-strings-attached sex).

So my first mistake was to let the whole thing whirlwind like it did. As I think I said, we'd been very close friends for about five years, and become intensely close over the prior six to eight months. As a result, and partly due to our age (we were both just past 30, which I think was a big factor for her), we were literally talking about wedding plans after a week. That set up a lot of high expectations that made what caused the crash and burn to be that much more catastrophic.

About a month into it, I finally went to see her. She's in Canada and I'm from the US. I was to spend about 10 days and would be staying in her apartment. We met, we kissed, we went back to her place, we fucked... it was great. I met her parents and had dinner, it was great, they loved me and I loved them. I met her friends, they also loved me.
...and then shit started to go sour.

I'd long talked a big game about my cooking. I am very good at cooking, and always gave her shit about eating out at McD's all the time, etc. So I was gonna cook a lot while I was at her place. Problem one: Fridge and cupboards were bare, and I had no car to go get groceries. I got a few things at the overpriced Safeway (which pissed me off), and cooked a couple dishes, which she gobbled down with gusto... but then the second problem. Her kitchen was a sty and her equipment was trash and terribly maintained. Her only pot big enough for pasta had burnt on trash in the bottom. She had no cleaning supplies so I had to go buy steel wool and scouring powder. I still couldn't clean her pot adequately. Her oven had pooled grease all over the floor that lit on fire when it got hot. Everything was so filthy, and she was completely blasé about it. It really kind of soured my opinion of her, not enough to break up of course, but it set up the final decision after we had a fight about something else...

Continued

So here's the fight that ended it.

One morning she was lying in bed on the phone with her mother. I'm doing my own thing and can't really hear what she's saying, but the tone of it was really disrespectful, and upset me (how she treated her mother had always been something that made me hesitant to be with her). One thing that I did hear her say was that she started talking about PTSD; saying that she had PTSD and that it was due to her mother pushing her so hard to do dressage riding as a teen.

Let me rewind slightly. I used to work in the insurance industry, and one of the things we always dealt with, and was kind of an office joke was people who would suffer some mild injury at work and claim it caused PTSD. As a result of that, I knew, by heart, the DSM criteria. And while I'm not a psychiatrist, I knew that she had suffered no "trauma" that would meet the diagnostic criteria (and moreover knew that she was self-diagnosing, which is another red flag).

After she got off the phone, I went to talk to her, because I wanted to know why she was saying she had PTSD. Of course, she took it as me challenging her (and in some sense, I suppose I was), which caused her to snap at me. I got up and walked away rather than engaging. That made her even angrier, which started her yelling. I finally snapped back, and then she started bawling (the fakest forced crying ever) before she stormed off to work.

When she did, she made a show of taking the designer purse I'd bought her as a gift and dramatically transferring all the contents back to the purse she'd had before. Then she stormed out.

I did feel bad about it, even if she was being stupid, because she certainly had some neuroticism tied to her horses even if it was *decidedly* not PTSD. So I texted her while she was at work to apologize. Only made her angrier. Tried again, she got angrier. So I left her alone.

Then she came back...

Continued

In one brief moment towards the end of the workday, she said that we'd go to the proper grocery store together and get things so we could have a proper dinner. So I was all ready to do that when she got back.

When she got back, she motioned me to sit down while she sat on the couch. And then the yelling began. If I said anything, she shouted me down, said I was being defensive and not appreciating the wrongfulness of what I'd done to her. And I mean ANYTHING, except "I'm sorry." She even kicked me out for about a minute, and I began walking... she ran out and started yelling at me in the alley before telling me to come back in. And then she yelled at me more.

One of the high points was when she got up, went to the fridge and got a tupperware of chili that I'd made the previous day, warmed it, sat down, and shoveled it down while shouting at me in between bites. She called me worthless and useless, reiterated that she didn't need me in her life, and took another bite of the food I'd made.

At that point, I was just trying to let her get it out of her system. It took three hours before she took a break. I was pretty drained... I was actually crying. She tried to sit next to me after awhile and put on the TV. I got up, put on my shoes, grabbed my phone, and went out the back door. She called after me, asking where I was going so late at night. "I'm getting some air," I called back.

I walked around the neighborhood until I was sure she wasn't tailing me, then found a place with open WiFi (no international service on my phone) and talked to my brother and parents. We all agreed that I needed to leave, that this wasn't acceptable, whatever was wrong with her, but that since it was late at night and I didn't want to risk her doing something crazy, I'd just go back and spend the night before leaving.

Continued

So I went back. I opened her back gate, and by the time I'd crossed her patio and opened the back door, she was there, in my face shouting. "Where were you?" "What were you doing?"

By this time, though, I'd calmed myself down substantially. I was cool, I was collected. "Woah, what's wrong? Why are you yelling? I just went out to get some air, like I said." She was having none of that. She was enraged about how "casual" I was being with her.

After about a half hour, she went to bed, but not before dramatically pushing my suitcase out of her bedroom. I'd had enough. I went in her room to get my other things. She yelled at me from the bed, at which point I replied, "Fuck you, I'm leaving."

It was like I'd dumped a bucket of ice water on her. She was out of bed and calmly trying to tell me to stay, to talk first; Where would I go, she wondered (back home); What would I do, she queried (get a job). I had my calm back and finally felt in control... but, I was tired, and didn't want to find a place to stay for the night without internet access.

So she talked me into lying down with her and talking. I figured I'd let her talk for a little bit and then go to bed. Well, she went on for two hours, and before long slipped back into berating me for everything from before, except now berating me for saying I'd leave her.

Around 3AM, I finally called it quits; I was going to go to sleep because nothing I was saying would calm her down, and not sleeping would only make it worse. She was angry about that, she wanted to talk more. Nope.

In the morning, it started again. She wanted to lie down and talk before she left for work. Okay, fine. I let her talk. Same shit as the night before, plus she was berating me about going to bed before she was done.

Then she let it slip: She had been so angry about me going for a walk because she thought she'd finally "gotten through to me" (when I was crying) and that she wanted to hear me explain that I understood why I was wrong.

Continued

I just let her talk and watched the clock for when she had to leave.

She had one last surprise though (and thank god it wasn't staying home from work). She wanted me to go down on her before she left for work. I think she was thinking it was a "reward" for me "understanding" why I was wrong and committing to being "better." I actually felt fucking dirty after that. Like I feel I understand women who get pressured into sex a bit better.

Anyway, after two hours of yelling at me, she left. About 10 minutes after that, I left, suitcases in tow. Got on a bus for the airport. My dad had changed my flight back. Before I left, I put her house key in an envelope and mailed it to her mother. I also left a nasty "Dear Jane" letter behind. My last little bit of dramaticism.

The real panic for me was the time between leaving and actually getting out of the country. I was terrified that she'd go apeshit and accuse me of raping her or trashing her apartment and getting me detained at the border. Thankfully, that didn't happen. I got home safe. Never talked to her again.

I would be lying if I said I didn't kinda miss being regular friends with her, though in retrospect it wasn't all that amazing. Sex was fun, sure, but it didn't really change anything. It gave me an appreciation for being single that I'd simply never understood before. I'm focusing on my career now and am a lot happier.

In conclusion, look at this story and figure what the differences would be if we'd been friends instead of lovers. We'd probably still be friends, probably wouldn't have fought so hard, etc. Being in a relationship really, really changes shit and introduces a lot of new failure points and problems you couldn't have anticipated before.

I'm not saying it's not worth getting in a relationship. But one mistake I made when I was younger, and a lot of guys make around here, is forgetting that getting a girl who likes you isn't the endgame. In reality, it's not even the halfway point.

>I'm not saying it's not worth getting in a relationship. But one mistake I made when I was younger, and a lot of guys make around here, is forgetting that getting a girl who likes you isn't the endgame. In reality, it's not even the halfway point.
This is unequivocally the hardest lesson to teach the “tfwnogf” fags. It’s especially bad when you’re obsessed with getting a gf, if you hit the point where you have one, you’re pretty much guaranteed to fail because your experience will never meet your expectations.

>She wanted me to go down on her before she left for work. I think she was thinking it was a "reward" for me "understanding" why I was wrong and committing to being "better." I actually felt fucking dirty after that

>ishyggds

It happens. I just wanted her to go away and complying seemed like the safest way to do it.

Thanks for the story user, reminds me of home. I know it's shitty of me, but I'm glad someone else experienced someone like that and got out. Thank you.

>I know it's shitty of me, but I'm glad someone else experienced someone like that and got out.
Hah, not at all man. I actually love telling that story. It was the craziest experience. Once I got across the border, all my anxiety over it was completely gone, and I was laughing about it. I think her pushing me over the edge that night kinda got the mourning out of my system.

That and the PTSD thing may have actually killed any attraction I'd had for her. Like I said, bullshit PTSD claims had been an office joke for me for, god, something like 5 years before I even met her. It's like she stopped being the girl I fell in love with and turned into a cringeworthy buffoon in the span of a few minutes.

It actually makes me think of this story a friend tells occasionally about when he was living in China. Literal 10/10 hot Asian girl waiting at a bus stop. Gorgeous, gorgeous model-tier girl, long legs, long hair, slender, the works. He can't stop looking at her. She lifts her slim arm up... extends a porcelain-white index finger... and places it against one nostril so she can do a farmer's blow. Shoots a good nugget of snot out on the ground. I die whenever I hear that.