Angie and I had been friends since the first week of college. After we graduated, we lived together for two years. We both worked in New York City, bouncing around various forms of paid and unpaid work as we figured out what we wanted to do with our lives. More than once, we woke up puzzling over the appearance of a new piece of furniture in the kitchen—a stool, or a set of shelves—usually the result of a late-night, tipsy impulse grab from a street-side pile on our way home. (We were not rich.)

I know how this friendship appeared to others. After a few margaritas, our neighbors once asked us: “You two are going to get together eventually... right?” That was the generous interpretation. The ungenerous one? The assumption that one of us—probably me—was desperately waiting in the wings. Surely, I had to be stuck in the friend zone.

In a classic episode of "Friends," Joey admonishes Ross that he and Rachel are headed for the friend zone: a pathetic relationship status in which Ross secretly pines for Rachel while she only sees him as a friend. Ross (eventually) avoids this fate, but the friend zone is a common experience for the rest of us: Unrequited love is ubiquitous and often occurs in the context of friendships. Furthermore, in many mixed-gender straight friendships, there exists some sexual attraction on the part of one or both parties.

No one enjoys being stuck in the friend zone. Friendships with people of one’s preferred gender carry this risk, and before Angie, I worried about it all the time. Making matters worse, the manosphere has seized upon this pervasive anxiety to transform the friend zone from an inoffensive reflection on the complications of mixed-gender heterosexual friendships into a misogynistic trope. To them, men need to max out their attributes to have success with women; straight men who are friends with women have fallen into a trap for chumps.

The friend zone concept deserves to be rehabilitated, especially in light of manosphere nonsense. For singles of all genders, in constructing your social world: If you don’t have friends of your romantically preferred gender, you’re doing it wrong. You should fix that.

My sibling-energy friendship with Angie makes the case. New York City is magnetic but daunting—especially if you don’t have a lot of money—and it’s hard to imagine how I would have managed it without Angie. As a young adult, not knowing how you’re going to make an income next month can be terrifying. If you’re jobless, it’s tempting to pack it in and move back to your hometown. Angie and I confronted this financial insecurity side by side, and it seemed far more manageable. When I was especially into someone, Angie knew how to make me look good, either by teeing me up to tell a good story, or by telling one herself and letting me coolly bide my time. Finally (and hilariously), I had a doomed stint in a Coldplay–meets–Dave Matthews jam band playing clubs in New York City and North Jersey. It probably would have been an even shorter stint had Angie not come to every show, and I had not carried with me the stage confidence that I earned to this day.

I also learned from watching the ways her experiences were different from mine. In a couple of ways, she had it easier. Strangers at bars took more of an interest in her than in me. I probably paid for more drinks and cover charges than she did. But let’s be real. Angie had to deal with stresses from which I was completely exempt. Take issues of safety. I enjoyed carefree shortcuts down dark, quiet streets; Angie would go well out of her way to stay in well-lit thoroughfares. A mutual female friend once ended up in a sketchy part of town because I gave her bad directions. When I acted insufficiently contrite, Angie laid into me, and with good reason: “You cannot fathom how scary that probably was for her!” At one point, Angie worked at a place where the sexual harassment was particularly intense; she endured it because she needed the job to keep affording the rent.

Much to the disappointment of our neighbors, Angie and I never remotely considered anything romantic. Instead, she was the most loyal and steadfast wingman I ever had.

People who fear the friend zone would tell you that embarking on this friendship was dangerous. The cult of “men and women can’t be friends” would have you believe that genuine mixed-gender friendships are impossible, and the only reason to maintain them is that they might one day “pay off” in a romantic or sexual way. If I had bought into these ideas, I would have missed out on my friendship with Angie—the key person who helped me survive New York.

The scientific record backs up my recommendations. When heterosexual men have more female friends (and fewer male friends), they tend to be less sexist in their beliefs, and they’re less likely to objectify women. So, straight men whose friendship circles contain a greater proportion of women are safer bets as boyfriend material than men who are only friends with other men.Lest you think that these men with lots of female friends are desperate losers: Heterosexual men who have larger other-gender networks of friends are more likely to find a romantic partner over time.

Like I said, Angie was my number one wingman. In fact, this finding is true for all genders: Anyone with a more gender-diverse network is more likely to find a case of mutual attraction.

A mixed-gender network—built slowly and gradually over time, without ulterior motives—is an effective, low-tech dating intervention from a time before Tinder. The men’s rights bros online would like to persuade straight men that platonic female companionship is unnatural and destructive to their romantic prospects. They couldn’t be more wrong, and their advice that men need to max out their desirable attributes is deeply misguided.

The broader truth is this: Relationships are much more likely to form as people spend time cultivating their social networks—they hang out with friends and casual acquaintances just for the sake of it. When people tell you they found a relationship when they were least expecting it, it’s not magic. It’s probably because they were busy doing things with other people. Which is precisely how partners come together.

Adapted from Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection by Paul Eastwick. Copyright © 2026 by Paul Eastwick. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

There was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.

By submitting your information you agree to the Psychology Today Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy

© Psychology Today