Guys: Friend Zone Yourselves

Ah the "friend zone". I have to be honest: I've had a lot of thoughts on everything I want to write after this intro paragraph, but I've struggled to start this piece off. I think at its core, there's an obvious message: kindness is a gift, not a debt transaction. If you're kind only because you expect something in return, you're not kind. At all. And that's not to say that people shouldn't want to try and impress or woo someone they're interested in, but if that's all you want, then there needs to be explicit communication. If you don't want to be "friend zoned", ask someone out on a date. Explicitly. A real invite with communicated intent. It's a simple concept, but one that is all too often ignored in a world full of male entitlement that commoditizes kindness for a relationship (or in many cases, just sex). But it's not exactly what I want to get at. I want to use the term to sort of re-contextualize what motives, goals, and desires could (should?) be.

Imagine an approach where you pre-friend zone your self going into a relationship (used to communicate an ongoing interaction, not a romantic relationship). It could be for any number of reasons: life circumstances, distance, age, being a coworker, incompatible goals, whatever. So what does pre-friend zoning yourself look like? Well, you've set boundaries for yourself: you're just going to be friends. That's the goal. And what is the appropriate way to act? Well, like you would with someone you aim to show someone that they're special to you. That they're worth extra attention and that your aim is to see them smile and feel valued. Now, I think it's desirable to have all our friends feel that way, but we know that a significant other does bring out a little extra degree of motivation. Do this all, and do this all not only without any expectation of something in return, but not wanting anything in return.

I happen to really like the idea of platonic love being more popular in today's society. Once a friend asked me if I have ever been just a little in love with a friend, to which I replied "I'd like to hope I am just a little in love with all my friends". And maybe there is some blurry area between platonic and romantic love, either in whole or in part. I know I have started to develop stronger feelings for people I know I can't or won't ever be anything more than friends with. Maybe this is where friend zoning yourself should take you, to that grey area. I'll admit, it might not be the easiest place to sit with your emotions sometimes, but overall, I feel like it should be an aspiration to place yourself in this state and master the emotions you feel. Forging a friendship where you become just a bit more invested in someone's happiness, success, and fulfillment, maybe having a few butterflies every time you speak with them, maintaining an excitement level when socializing or doing activities together, it's not a bad state to be in. Imagine a world in which you can make another person feel great for being the person they are, nothing more. Why shouldn't that be a goal?

When you enter a romantic relationship with someone, you never have any clue if it's going to work out. And here is where I think people miss the mark with dating, romance, and relationships: so many people go into relationships with a goal of it lasting forever. It's not the case all the time, but certainly as people age, there's more of a desire to have something long term to permanent, particularly in the case where a person is monogamous. I never date with the intention of "I hope this only lasts a few months", but my goal is to be the best boyfriend that I can be, and that if the relationship doesn't work out, that my partner values herself, knows her worth, and will never allow anyone henceforth to treat her with anything less than she deserves. And if being that best boyfriend I can possibly be leads to a lifetime partner, which I would consider an ideal outcome, then that's fantastic. I think there's a subtle nuance between a relationship lasting forever being a goal or an outcome. As a goal, it's a vague endpoint without a plan and many ways to get there. In contrast, it being an outcome means you're focused on something else, something more concrete and actionable. If the relationship doesn't last, for one person the goal failed, and for the other person, you set out doing the things you wanted to do and perhaps that ideal state outcome didn't surface, but that feels a lot better. To use an analogy, it's sort of like saying "I want to get an A" instead of "I want to learn a lot in this class". If you learn a lot in the class, you're really focused on doing the right things to end up getting an A. If your only goal is to get an A, you haven't stated anything you're actually acting on. And there are honest and dishonest ways to get an A...just like there are good and really awful, toxic ways to make relationships last longer.

So to lean back into the friend zone aspect of this, instead of giving a partner an expectation of kindness, positive interactions, feelings of worth and happiness, and all for no other reason than for being who they are, give that to a friend. I never set out in any of my interactions with people with this concept of friend zoning myself in mind, per se. Quite honestly, I think my codependent tendencies make this sort of my natural behavior. I primarily feel good when I am making other people feel good, and quite often I want to go the extra mile to make friends and coworkers feel cared about. And while I am not saying codependence is a good thing, or that I act purely out of codependence in my actions, I think there are probably some behaviors that I am taking and utilizing in this concept of "friend zoning yourself". It pains me to see friends end up with partners that don't treat them well. And if they happen to be of the opposite sex, it's never from a place of "I would treat her so much better", but of "she deserves so much better". Look at the differences in those sentences (pro tip: watch out for how other people communicate. If someone speaks like the former and not the latter, watch out!) It should be a goal for all of us to be such good friends to others (in my case as a heterosexual man, to women) that they will end up with a great partner and don't settle for less. If more and more men adopt this mentality, then the overall quality of the populace improves! Seems like a good outcome to me. Even if you're self-centered and wonder what's in it for you, well, here's what's in it for you. You are conditioning yourself to be a better person. Now, if that isn't enough of a reward in and of itself, then realize that, in general, being a better person, learning about interacting with people, learning about yourself, just becoming more emotionally aware, that's all going to help lead to better relationships in the future. Chances are your friendships will also be more fulfilling, too.

So there you have it; let's take this term that's endemic amongst entitled males and turn it into something that we can drive positive intentions and behaviors out of.

Love and celebrity crushes: a personal history

From a young age, I've had tunnel vision with respect to the person I've been interested in. I never understood being attracted to anyone else if I was in love with someone. I'm not just saying that; I've had numerous other friends and girlfriends even remark about it. I've gotten the "where were you on that!?" line from a (married) co-worker when an attractive woman walked by our booth at dinner, and another co-worker replied "Anthony doesn't pay attention to women like that." I've gotten from one ex-girlfriend, "you really don't show a lot of interest in other women at all, do you?" and from another, before I was even dating her but after I was already enamored with her, she would always exclaim when she'd point out a nice butt, and I'd never know what she was talking about or who she was even looking at. I've always just been so in love and perfectly content with the person I'm with and never quite understood celebrity crushes.

Well, fast forward to my 30s. The dating pool is smaller, I'm not exactly optimistic about my relationship prospects, intellectually I conceptually don't think monogamy makes sense (though emotionally it is still what I desire), and I have been critical of my previous tunnel vision anyhow. It doesn't seem as though this sort of complete disinterest in any sort of attraction is either healthy or unhealthy. People routinely have celebrity crushes and don't seem any worse for the wear from it in relationships (anecdotally). For the first time in my life, I'm dating. Before I sort of just ended up in relationships. There wasn't much intentional about it. Despite being highly analytical and passionate about data, my emotions for the first 30 years of my life tended to win out when it came to romantic interests. I'd even say that two of my relationships were explicitly not logical to me from the beginning, but when you can't get someone out of your head, you feel like it's probably better to just give in and hope for the best than to endure the torture of someone permeating your thoughts constantly and not doing anything about it.

Dating is VERY different. If you're intentionally dating, it's not organic. It's purpose driven. I'd even argue it's not really fun, at least for me. What happened, though, for the first time in my life I am in a period where it actually seems okay to indulge in a celebrity crush. Now, I use the term "celebrity" lightly because I'm so far removed from pop culture that I don't know who people reference whenever they talk about actors and actresses. A celebrity for me is an obscure musician nine times out of ten. Now, there's actually some other underlying issue with celebrity crushes and me. A celebrity crush is easy; it's highly unrealistic. It's so far outside of the realm of normal possibility that it's safe. There's no emotional attachment (at least in theory). You're not putting yourself out there. There's no rejection, nothing that can hurt you. It's a low risk and fun exercise, even sharing across sexes. When going to Wacken Winter Nights, I encouraged our group to each have a list of three crushes in the bands. As a man and with women being scarce among the bands playing, my options were more limited, so I was more doing it to egg on my female friends, but I made mine as well.

But here is the funny thing: most of these things are usually done on a superficial level, right? I'm sure that there are people who like Angelina Jolie (sorry I legitimately don't know who the current hot actress is) or Jason Momoa for their personalities, but if we're honest with ourselves, we know the majority of the people attracted to them source that attraction from their physical appearance. Now I would say that all of my three were physically attractive, but they weren't really the hottest women there. No, my crushes were because of following them or their path to music and knowing some of their backstory. The blind singer and woodwind player with a voice of an angel who posts her favorite places to go for serenity, the hurdy gurdy player who got added into a band she did song covers of when learning to play the instrument. The woman who I deemed straight out of a Danish fairy tale with an alluring voice and an enchanting energy. If the point of a celebrity crush is to have it be purely superficial without any sort of other form of attachment, I was failing.

Enter my latest "celebrity" crush. And this crush was what prompted this entire post because it's an amalgamation of my old and new interests and values. It all flooded my thoughts last night (several nights ago when I actually wrote this). I didn't feel strongly until I did, and that was when all these separate pieces collided into each other like the people in the mosh pit at the show I was at. The crush? Marion from Aephanemer. I'm not quite sure the best way to present all the colliding thoughts, so I'm just going to throw it all out there and hope it seems cogent. When I was younger, all I ever wanted was a family. Today I'm not sure if that's true. I'm not sure if I have any interest in kids now that I've progressed to this stage in my life and am not remotely close to having a life partner. Putting aside the "monogamy doesn't seem logical" part of my brain, I'm not close to having a significant other either. But that younger desire was still there. And while I know most men dream of having a son, I definitely wanted daddy's little girl. That led me to the revelation I had: if I had a daughter who would I want her to look up to? Who would I be beaming with pride if she grew up to be (and I'd be proud of the person she became from her own experiences and decisions and being her own person, of course)? I don't know Marion personally at all, but from a surface level, she checked that box in addition to possessing the qualities that I find very attractive.

Marion does vocals and rhythm guitars for Aephanemer in addition to being the writer behind the lyrics. Women are becoming more prevalent in the metal scene and very slowly becoming more populous as being recording artists. When present in a band, they do tend to be vocalists more often than not. In folk metal, you do see a number playing traditional folk instruments, and there are plenty of women who are the sole mastermind behind an entire band and do all the writing and recording. But in general, the Tarjas and the Floors and the Simones and the Nooras of the world outnumber the Amelie Bruuns (Myrkur) and the Chelsea Wolfes of the world. All that to say, it's uncommon to see a woman guitarist, particularly in a genre like melodic death metal compared to something more folky or atmospheric. So you have her, a prominent member front and center, unleashing piercing screams and gutteral growls while playing away on guitar, singing about stoicism. Further, she seems comfortable in her own skin, which is incredibly attractive. I would never criticize any woman for her choice in clothing, makeup, hair color, etc. Women dressed to the nines certainly do target a certain audience, but I always tell people they should shut the hell up until they try singing opera in a corset. Nevertheless, Marion comes on stage like the metalhead you'd meet at a bar: jeans, t-shirt, wristbands. She has long beautiful hair that is only just beginning to grey, and she lacks visible tattoos. On every point above, I admire her. She is a phenomenal musician, wears what she wants, looks how she likes, and doesn't cave into any of the pressure or expectations pushed upon women by society. I can certainly find appeal in women with a ton of tattoos, but I don't have any myself right now, and in my younger years, I sort of saw it as the body in it's purest, unadulterated form. The lack of need or desire to outwardly want that expression of art to show anyone, or even yourself, could be seen as total self assuredness and taking meaning from within. The horrible double standard of grey hair on women being undesirable and sexy on men should fuck right off. But that aside, I've told several exes that I loved the idea of my partner having grey hair and not dying it. When you love someone so fully and you share life with them, every grey hair represents an experience, a shared moment, a sign of the impermanence of life but a reminder that we're still here. I've seen absolutely stunning women and stunning hair once it's partially or fully greyed or silvered. And sure, being the age I am now, I'm probably not going to see my partner's hair go silver from the beginning, so they're not ALL shared experiences, but I think it's a reminder that we all have our stories, and I'd love to share those stories and memories and lessons learned. So the fact that she has hair that has begun to grey (and she may very well dye it, I can't know for sure, but the fact that it doesn't seem such a heavy priority to her is still relevant, in my estimation) is a huge positive in my interpretation of her beliefs and philosophy. Finally, her smile. The joy she conveys on stage. There's an authenticity in her eyes and her smile when she performs. I think there's a spectrum of smiles from purely for show to one that is fully genuine. Some performers live on the inauthentic end of the spectrum, probably most are somewhere in the middle. I truly got the sense that Marion's smile was 100% authentic. All of her words and actions seemed so genuine; her gratitude for the support and appreciation for the experience she was having was conveyed with such sincerity. Oh, and maybe on a purely superficial level, her accent, annunciation, and word cadence are enough to make me get a stupid grin because I find it really attractive. French accents aren't usually at the top of my list, but hers is 😅

But to bring it back around, the sum of all these parts, the musical talent, the intelligence and introspection behind her lyrical topics, her authenticity, standing up in the face of musical and societal norms, her gratitude and humility, when I look at all that combined, then you throw the physical characteristics I find beautiful and my affinity for her accent on top, that's the anatomy of a celebrity crush. She is thriving in an art that present me has such extreme respect and admiration for, she appeals to the sensibilities that past me had that have stuck with me even after all this time. She's someone who seems, on the surface, to be someone that little girls everywhere could look up to. I'd love for her to inspire girls, pre-teens, and teens everywhere, for them to watch a video of her perform and say "I want to growl and play guitar like the pretty lady!" To pick up a guitar and practice and have the determination in the face of a male dominated scene to succeed. To feel comfortable in their own bodies and skins and clothes no matter what anyone else says. To rise above any negativity and show genuine appreciation for those who show their love and support. I can only hope she is already having this impact on young women all over the world. And if you happen to be reading, Marion, I hope this post shows you that you're really a treasure in this world, and that someone who really doesn't know you at all can still have a very deep appreciation for what he has seen in what you've shared with the world.

The Age Conundrum: How Does Age Impact Our Mentalities Towards Relationships?

As an aging individual who is no closer to marriage than the day he came out of the womb, this is something that, as much as I try not to think about it too much, is more and more in my consciousness. I know I have talked about there not being "The One" in the past, but it doesn't change the fact that we are sort of conditioned to think about having a partner, and I am still a hopeless romantic at heart. Aside from this, though, I do have fascination with psychology and behavior, and as I have aged, naturally both my friends and the people I have dated have aged as well (I am definitely not the type to date much younger than I am). I'll tell you what I expected to see: I expected to see relationships lasting longer because, well, we're not getting any younger, and the fear of being alone begins to outweigh the desire to be in the relationship we want. I expected folks to settle, to put up with more and get less in return, to encounter severe problems with resignation and just continue on in a an unfulfilling relationship.

Much to my surprise, I believe I have found the opposite. Relationships seem to fizzle out more quickly. In hindsight, I do feel this does make just as much, if not more, sense than my original hypothesis. I think there are probably three contributing factors. The first I think speaks to "young love". Younger individuals may feel more inclined to stick in a relationship because it's a first love or unfamiliar territory. Without having experienced heartbreak or negative aspects of relationships, it does make it conducive to continuing on for a longer period of time due to lack of experience and wherewithal to identify problem areas or red flags. Younger individuals are also still developing into the people they'll grow up to be; certainly as teenagers we do have aspects of ourselves that are fairly firmly cemented into our makeup that won't change, but there are many other areas in which we will continue to change in. As we age, those aspects are a bit less likely to change, and therefore "we know what we want" and can identify if a relationship will satisfy those desires or not. That increased level of certainty along with the experience to enable identifying positives and negatives in relationships lend to older individuals having shorter relationships.

The second item, and this is perhaps what both makes sense and surprises me at the same time, is the desire to invest effort to making a relationship work. I really and truly believe that all relationships require effort, no matter how "right" people are for each other. A couple really should never be at the point of stagnation; much like we should always strive to grow and better ourselves, our relationships should continue to grow and find new ways to thrive as well. Now, with youth there may come a propensity to not be able to recognize incompatibility or significant issues that will make a relationship unfeasible. When we are younger, however, there is also probably a subconscious reassurance that even if the relationship fails, we're still young, and there is still plenty of time to find love anew. The older we get, the more doubt that resides there will be opportunities later. The longer we continue in a relationship that we have any sort of doubt about, the more time we've "wasted". I truly feel I have witnessed this very thing. And it is logical: the longer we spend in unsuccessful relationships, the more time we spent out of the dating pool, and the more time that others in our age range in the dating pool become unavailable (and at an older age, perhaps it is reasonable to make the assumption that more people exit the dating pool than enter the dating pool, but it certainly is not a one way flow of people). The flip side to this is does it make folks lazy? Does it make people more likely to nitpick items that are easily resolved or that are non-issues as a means to move on? There are a number of ways where this phenomenon results in folks demonstrating an unwillingness to put forth the requisite effort to make a relationship work. As someone is wired to give an immense amount of himself to others, due in part to a difficulty in finding the ability to love himself, this is a harshreality to encounter. In many instances it may be the right thing to cut short a relationship because it wasn't the right one, but in many other instances a relationship that does have a natural fit and legitimate promise may be cut short due to the anxiety of spending too long in a relationship and it not working out at an older age.

Now, one item that I think, at a minimum, facilitates the above, and perhaps is more responsible than either of the two reasons above, is the progression of technology and the ease with which people can find potential partners. This impacts us two ways. One is the actual ability to find more people more quickly than ever before with loads of information available at our fingertips. A second, less obvious outcome is perhaps a byproduct of the availability. Due to the technology, people may have developed a mentality to date around more and not invest as much regardless of if they use the technology to do so. Now, this could very well be an age independent variable as well, but to the extent it adds fuel to the fear of time commitment fire outlined above, it cannot be understated the role that technology and dating services play in how relationship behavior has changed. And, anecdotally, since this was not nearly as prevalent in my younger years, I have a difficult time comparing my younger years to my older years due to an inability to adequately correct for this variable. I do still believe that the other explanations provided are compelling enough to think there's merit to the hypothesis that relationships are shorter the older we get (when removing the relationships that end in marriage, that is).

At the end of the day, we're still individuals with our own tendencies and different inclinations on how to treat relationships. I don't know that my mentality will change that much for any of the reasons I listed above; if anything, I treat each failed relationship as just that: a failure, and it makes me try that much harder next time. It's probably a somewhat destructive mentality, as even now I am left wondering what more I can possibly do, and I fear that I won't be adequate for future potential partners because I will have set expectations of myself that I won't be able to continue to surpass. Being able to frame how others may perceive relationships as they age, though, has been a valuable dedication of my time as it makes me more aware of what I may encounter in the future.

Why Your Employees Don't Like Your Offsite Meetings

Hi-di-ho! Lately I have felt more and more like writing, so perhaps you'll see a few blog posts. It was actually interesting going back and reading some half to nearly complete drafts from a couple of years ago. Not sure if I will finish those as well or just start with fresh writing. In any case, this was a piece that I felt like publishing on Linkedin, but due to obvious ramifications with employers and that it would be perceived quite negatively (despite companies insisting they want honest feedback so they can improve), I figured I would just write it here.

Anyone who has worked in corporate America has been to one: the annual offsite meeting. For those unfamiliar, it is common for companies to host a meeting at a venue, typically a hotel conference room, hire a speaker to come in and talk to the company about something the company leaders find pertinent to, and perhaps lacking for, the company and/or the employees. It's part motivational speech, part educational lecture, sometimes part team building, and rarely very influential. Now, leaders will typically place the blame for the lack of impact squarely on the shoulders of the employees. It is assumed that folks who don't take the meeting seriously are negative influence on the environment, and sometimes there is truth to that. There are feelings that the company is doing something valuable for employees and that they should reward the employer by taking everything to heart, putting whatever the topic of discussion was into practice in the workplace, and that it should yield the desired outcome the employer had in mind when they picked the speaker.

Nothing stated above is really outlandish, and I am sure that managers and non-managers alike can think of the cancerous employees in their workplaces. They are only a small fraction of the problem, though, and I feel there is a much bigger issue that often goes lost on the company leadership. There is a reason that there is widespread disinterest and lack of enthusiasm at such events, and it is not because a cancerous few have permeated the atmosphere of the company and influenced everyone in a negative manner. Employees don't go into these meetings expecting not to get anything out of them. Quite the opposite actually; I believe most employees look forward to seeing a speaker come in to share some insight and value with the organization, and they hope to get something out of the event. The skepticism comes from the fact that the people who need to heed the words are the ones least likely to listen, and those people are the company leaders. To illustrate, I will give a couple of examples.

Take an insurance company whose profitability has suffered for several years running. The company employs at least a good number of smart, competent people who have not managed to fix the issues causing the lack of profitability, but the reason for that comes from IT resource bottlenecks and dated sophistication relative to the competition. For this offsite meeting, a speaker is brought in who speaks about Progressive Insurance and their innovation in motorcycle pricing segmentation. The speaker goes on about how they created a positive risk selection mechanism for their company and forced their competitors into an adverse selection downward spiral. The speech is very well articulated and insightful. The leaders of the company picked someone who addressed the issues at hand quite well, and the problem is not that the employees did not hear or understand the message. The management did not live into the lessons and takeaways. What message does it send to your employees when you have someone lecture on segmentation when you then turn around and tell them they can only take a flat base rate increase (in laymen's terms, the most unsophisticated, broad, across the board change you can make that only serves to throw a company further into the aforementioned adverse selection downward spiral)? What does it communicate to the pricing actuaries who developed a by-peril rating algorithm years earlier and were not allowed to implement it? The end result is you have a group of employees that feel like management not only does not trust their talents enough to solve issues by bringing in someone to highlight issues they are already aware of and have not been enabled to try to fix, but that the message that is being preached falls on deaf ears.

Further, let's look at another example. A company brings in a speaker to discuss workplace behaviors and leadership styles and meshes it with the company culture and goals. The exercise is engaging, encourages participation and contemplation. It is designed to make people fit in and make the company seem like a very employee environment-centric company. The speaker talks about how companies that succeed tend to employee a workforce whose styles and attributes align with the types of goals the company sets, and proceeds to unveil his view of the company's artifacts, that is, the explicitly communicated objectives from the company's website or other materials highlighting what the company strives to be. What does the exercise show? Well, that the work force does not align at all with their communicated objectives. Instead of learning from this and either changing the goals and external messages, or working to emphasize shifting the environment to better suit the established objectives, they continue down the path of executing on a strategy that runs contrary to the values set forth in their messaging, persist with the clash in what is asked and what is expected, and seemingly ignore everything that the speaker highlighted in his presentation. Again, what does this communicate to the employees?

At the end of the day, there is responsibility held by each individual to put in the effort to learn from and incorporate the knowledge acquired into his/her work. That much should not be disputed. To what extent an employee can do that, however, is largely dictated by factors outside of his/her control, and that is where the leadership of a company is so important. All too often, when middle and upper management demonstrate time and time again that they are blind to the damage they do to employee morale by hosting offsite meetings and not living into the message communicated. At best, it is disappointing to employees, at worst, it is patronizing. One thing is for certain, though, in order to truly get the utility desired from such meetings, companies need to have buy in at all levels of the company, and that means the leaders at the company most of all.