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What Exactly Is the Friendzone?
Romance and friendship clash in the boundary-blurring twilight of the friendzone.
Relationships are shifting, as noted by authors of a recent study of “friendzoning” (LeFebvre et al., 2022), in the journal Imagination, Cognition, and Personality: Consciousness in Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice:
“People habitually do not process new information and use old stereotypes as relationship behavioral guides; as such, they are often mindless when it comes to thinking about the communication in their relationship.
Since relationships are so key for mental health, it’s good to get a handle on what’s happening. Alongside increasing fluidity and renegotiation of core aspects of identity such as gender, culture, and ethnicity -relationships nowadays are evolving, increasingly complex, and undergoing a spontaneous redesign.
Contemporary emerging terminology includes, as elaborated by study authors: “on-again/off-again,” “hooking-up,” “relationship churning,” “back-burner relationships,” “ ghosting,” “backcatching feelings,” and of course the dreaded “friendzone.”
