As a woman with a lot of male friends, none of whom appear to be desperately pining over me, putting their entire lives on hold in case I suddenly discover that they are my true loves, Fiene’s piece seemed not just patently absurd, but also to express an incredibly depressing worldview. Let me go through the lines that made me saddest.

Being caught in the Friend Zone is an inarguable drag on fertility rates, as a man who spends several years pledging his heart to a woman who will never have his children is also a man who most likely won’t procreate with anyone else during that time of incarceration.

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It’s amazing how this sort of analysis always ends up implying that men are hapless dummies incapable of complex social interactions or finding alternate ways to pursue their goals if one approach fails. I guess I wouldn’t have any male friends if I assumed they were all too clueless to read social signals, analyze emotional situations with any sort of sophistication, or manage their own emotions. That might get me accused of being a condescending jerk who underestimates half the planet. But that could just be me.

By “friends,” I don’t mean acquaintances or chummy colleagues you only see at work, or friends of friends that you don’t get together with outside of a group setting, or what I call buffer-zone friends—people of the opposite sex you can be friends with because there is a significant other in between to take the romantic element out of the equation. Rather, by “friend” I mean someone you deliberately choose to spend one-on-one time with.

This is going to sound totally wild, but what if people who had significant others also spent time with other people socially one-on-one? And what if the people they were married to, and the people they were spending time with one-on-one, were also of the same gender? To get really revolutionary, what if a married person spent time with a friend one-on-one, and socialized as a couple with their spouse, their friend, and their friend’s spouse?

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This is brave of me, but I am standing here before you today, a real-life human woman, and saying that I in fact do all of these things regularly. In fewer than two minutes, I came up with a list of 10 men whom I hang out with one-on-one, and whom my husband and I also see along with their wives. One of them introduced me to my husband. Another one officiated at our wedding. A third is coming over to our house with his wife and baby daughter for dinner this weekend. These aren’t “buffer-zone friends,” in that they aren’t peripheral to my life. They’re important to me. They’re also friends with my husband. So many things can be true simultaneously!

Imagine that friendship is a good that people acquire in exchange for the currency of their time. The average man lives in a competitive friendship market where some forms of friendship appeal to him more than others and therefore get his business.

If I saw life this way, I think I would have cast myself into the sea years ago.

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If you are a lady who believes your dude friends are genuinely “just friends,” ask yourself this: Which of these things are you better at giving a man than another man is? The answer is clear. None of them. You are not especially good at liking “Karate Ninja 7: Exploding Hands of Fury,” or informing the offensive line of the Chicago Bears, via your Samsung, that they are all false starting idiots.

Given that I am a professional critic, I am actually much better than some available men at liking “movies where things explode.” In fact, I am outstanding at discussing them at great length, and often do so with the male critics who are not my husband with whom I regularly have dinner before or drinks after said press screenings. As an additional asset, as a critic who writes about the political significance of pop culture, I am highly skilled not merely in enjoying cultural depictions of exploding things but also in making people feel like their guilty pleasures are anything but. With regard to my ability to talk about sports, I offer as references the men with whom I played fantasy football for several years, who got to enjoy my elaborate and macabre theories about how Bill Belichick motivates the New England Patriots.

But because God designed these virtues to entice men into marriage, the average man will never be content to receive those gifts in a form of companionship that doesn’t lead to marriage. Quite simply, men can’t be at peace being just friends.

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