Why do men keep putting me in the Girlfriend-zone?

Homosocial bonding is different between men and women, and this causes a lot of confusion and why it's assumed that men and women cannot be friends.

Men see their friendships as camaraderie, hanging out, occasional complaining, and chilling. There's plenty of support mechanisms in place, but they're not intimate, per se.

Women on the other hand are intimate, affectionate, they talk more about how they feel than how things happened. The support mechanisms are explicitly intimate.

So, men who are not used to intimate physical contact and discourse have to translate a person of the opposite sex being physically and emotionally intimate beyond the boundaries of relationships he is used to.

Women may say that this is really the man's fault for getting his hopes up, but it's worth noting that scientists have found that this disparity in relationships has an actual significant effect on different genders. Men and women are programmed differently.

As the study shows, women share their emotional intimacy through much broader networks. They don't restrain it for that one special person. They give it out freely. They take it in easily.

And also, as the study shows, men reserve their emotional intimacy for one special person. They rely on that person. They hold back until they find someone they can trust and then pour it out to them.

This actually makes male intimacy a far more dear thing than female intimacy. This is why men "overreact." This is why men panic. Above all, this is why the Nice Guy misreads his interactions with a woman he likes.

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Now you can look at the nice guy phenomenon through a sharper lens. Men are used to emotional intimacy being saved for a special person, women are not. Women find emotional stability in poor romantic relationships, while men do not.

This confuses the fuck out of the Nice Guy. None of this makes sense. A woman is being emotionally intimate with him, he thinks he's special since that's how he would act. A woman stays in a bad relationship, he thinks it's illogical since that's not how he would act. Combined, this becomes the "I would be good to you, what's wrong with you!" mindset.

Of course, he doesn't understand that a woman has cultivated many intimate relationships with friends and family while he has been working on the one trying to develop a romance. The woman doesn't need to get her emotional support from her romantic relationship. In fact, she can spend all day talking about how bad her relationship is - but at least she's not single, and maybe her partner provides some other value beyond emotional intimacy.

In regard to how the nice guy is viewed, the woman sees his actions as those of just another friend, since that's how she would act toward her friends - freely intimate, physically affectionate. When the guy doesn't get what he wants, she will sometimes feel betrayed, primarily because he has willingly integrated himself into her network and then has destroyed the status quo.

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