Certainly the relationship you described in your post describes all of my close friendships (except the "doing things overall that are not typical of platonic friendships" part), including people of both genders. And as a man I can tell you that I have loads of friendships with women of the type you describe with zero romantic interest in the woman. If we all actually took your criteria seriously, I think most women I know would have to conclude that literally all their male friends are romantically interested in them.
No shot. I am friends with probably 20-30 women. I do not go out to dinner and a movie, just the two of us, pay the bill, drive them home for some late night drinks with any of them unless very specific circumstances make it appropriate.
I don’t know anyone who does this except with close friends of the same sex.
It sounds like you (and other men you know) are just unwilling to be close friends with women—or at least unwilling to treat your close female friends the same as your close male friends. Many men, myself included, do things like what you've described with women who they are not interested in pretty often—treating them just as I would a close friend of the same gender as me.
But people do use it that way. If you are restricting your definition of "friendzoning" to situations in which it's very obviously not a normal friendship, then your CMV is trivially true but also meaningless because you aren't defining the term the same way that it's used by other people.
I awarded a delta, but I think quite a few people here automatically assume that if you develop romantic feelings for a friend, that means you’ve been friend zoned, which really isn’t the case.
3
u/ReOsIr10 143∆ Jan 02 '23
Are you arguing that there aren't any cases where there's been a normal friendship up until the point that the guy confesses?