So there's someone special in your life, and drat it all to hell, you are not someone special in their life. You are, in fact, a pretty mediocre type of someone, a flat grayish ordinary kind of blur in their life who is around and is inoffensive and that's about it. You are, as the great thinkers of our age have dubbed it, in the "friend zone," and would like nothing more than to get out of this horrible zone and have that special someone love you and sit on you.

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Yesssss.

You'll note that I'm keeping this advice gender-neutral, because despite how creepily male-oriented the available literature is, love can go unrequited in both directions. So whether your object of desire is a boy, girl, or cleverly modified stuffed animal, I hope you'll find some wisdom here that you might not find elsewhere. Because there's a lot of bad advice out there. Indeed, there's a cottage industry of men with one too many shirt buttons undone full of tips on how to traverse from this dreaded Friend Zone into the Heavy Petting District.