By YAGI OLAGUERA

DISCUSSED: Dating, The Truth About Quicksand, Ryan Reynolds

I can be a total idiot when it comes to dating. I’ve proven this time and time again in the almost two decades that I’ve attempted to chase after members of the fairer sex. Though I have had my share of success in that department, it still doesn’t change the fact that my facepalm-worthy moments always stick out more than my victories.

Actual picture of me after a date

As of late, my recent failures in the romance department have fallen in a single category. I seem to have been making the same mistake for more than half of the decade and I’ve been convinced that I’m cursed. It seems to me that I’ve fallen into the friend zone more times than I care to admit and I can never really figure out how to get out of it.

The thing is, I actually believe that this whole friend zone thing is a relatively new cultural phenomenon. It definitely was not around during the late 90’s when my admittedly flawed views on dating were first formed. During those days, being friends seemed like the only way you were going to get the girl. Both of the relationships I’ve been in, as well as the relationships of many of the people around me, seemed to support this view. Those experiences however would leave me unprepared for my first brush with what I would later know as “the friend zone”.

I first encountered the phenomenon in 2003. I was riding in my friend’s car along Katipunan and we noticed that this new coffee shop had just opened. Our curiosity was piqued, so we immediately checked the place out. We found a comfy looking zen-inspired café. As I peered inside the café, I noticed that the girl working the bar looked all too familiar.

A couple of months earlier, I was hanging out with Starbucks Katipunan with some of my friends when I saw this tall girl with striking eyes and nice cheekbones. She was reading a book and wearing a long jacket (I remember this detail because of the Cake song) and she stood out from the rest of the rest of the crowd. I often get fleeting crushes on people who I find strikingly unique but I rarely remember their faces when they leave. This one was obviously different since I remembered her, so I entered the café to find out who she was.

I was a lot more naïve back then and I believed way too much in fate and the universe conspiring in your favor and all of the happy hippie bullshit. As stupid as it sounds now, I believed that it was destiny that brought me there. I believed it was somehow predestined to meet this girl who I never thought I’d see again. I was fucking stupid.

GO F*CK YOURSELF PAULO COELHO!

Armed with this idiotic confidence that the higher powers were with me on this one, I quickly became one of the café’s most loyal customers. Through my daily patronage of the café, I made friends with the people who ran it, including this girl I was crazy over. I was especially surprised at how easily I got along with the girl. I got really encouraged by this and thought that it would only be a matter of time before I got the girl.

Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being has a few chapters entitled A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words. In these chapters, Milan Kundera explains how different words and phrases meant different things to his characters. Love in my experience meant closeness and friendship; as trite as it sounds, I totally agreed with Joni Mitchell’s description of it as “touching souls” in the song “A Case of You.” I never did figure out what her definition of love was but her definition of it was apparently not the same as mine.

Quicksand was such an awesome band. Just sayin’.

I didn’t see it then. Like I said, I honestly believed things were on the right track. This girl was going to be mine. That wasn’t true apparently because I wasn’t the only person who felt that way. It turned out that many people including a close friend of mine felt the same thing. I eventually realized that she didn’t treat me the way she did because she liked me; she was like that because damn it, she was just that goddamn nice to everybody. That was just the way she was.

The realization came very slowly and painfully. It was like I had stepped into quicksand and only realized that I was sinking when it was too late. By the time I figured out what was happening, I was already being swallowed by it and no matter how I struggled I couldn’t get out.

Before this, I always thought that I could gauge if a person actually returned any feelings I had. After that though, I’ve been convinced that my instincts are totally shot. The great Paul Westerberg from the almighty Replacements once talked about having a dyslexic heart. I never really understood what the song meant until then. Since then, this song with Westerberg’s admitted inability to properly read someone’s advances has been the permanent soundtrack to my romantic failures.

A few years later, I would watch what I thought was a harmless comedy starring Ryan Reynolds called Just Friends. Watching the movie made me realize that there was an actual term for what I had experienced with Ms. Long Jacket. What was supposed to be a stupid forgettable movie turned into the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. According to the movie, everything I knew about love and dating apparently would lead to the graveyard of possibility called “the friend zone”.

We often take for granted how much language defines our existence. Hellen Keller once said that before she learned the words “I” and “me”, consciousness didn’t exist in her. Before she learned language that would define her world, it was as if nothing was actually real. Naming something makes it real and tangible for us. Who knew that some insipid comedy starting Ryan fucking Reynolds would help turn my experience with Ms. Café Owner from a fluke to a habit?

I at least never had it this bad.

By defining the friend zone as an actual term, the experience was actualized and metastasized into something to fear, so much that it’s always my primary concern whenever I meet someone I even remotely like. Whenever I feel like things are going good, I immediately fear that things are too good to be true. I start feeling like I’m in quicksand once again. I start over-thinking. My Kevin Arnoldesque inner commentary goes into overdrive and I start second guessing myself. It’s so bad that I even second-guess my second guessing. If I do take action before it’s too late I often do the exact thing that I’m not supposed to do. Before I know it, I’m sucked back into the friend zone where all hope comes to die.

My most painful brush with the friend zone phenomenon happened just a few years ago. I had met this girl that was absolutely nothing like anyone I’ve met before. She was an engineer, something that was rare in my circle of friends that was mostly made up of musicians, artists, writers and various permutations thereof. In spite of this, she has genuine respect and interest for the artier side of things.

Damn you Richard Linklater. I’m still waiting for my Julie Delpy

I never talked and listened as openly as I did with her. We talked about our hopes, dreams, ideals, the future, and all of those other things that really matter. We’d go on these epic walks and have these conversations that I never wanted to end. I was never as interested to hear someone’s stories as I was with her. Our moments felt like a Richard Linklater movie. It felt like the touching souls thing I mentioned a while ago and I knew that there was something mutual there.

Somewhere however in all this talk of philosophy and ideals and whatnot was the past that wasn’t really touched on. I don’t know whose fault it was; it could be that I wasn’t really paying much attention when she said it or it could have been that she never really told me at all but she was kind of seeing someone. Though at the time, it was not completely serious, it was already headed there and there was nothing I could do to stop it. All my illusion of the perfect ideal relationship crumbled as I realized that all she ever wanted out of it was friendship.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m totally down with meaningful platonic friendships but I absolutely suck at taking rejection. The feeling of sinking in quicksand resumed. At first, I took the rejection from that incident the same way I usually did. I fought it kicking and screaming (albeit passive aggressively) and I refused to let it go. I eventually did realize however that my getting all butthurt about it wasn’t going to do anything and the less I struggled the more I realized that I would eventually float.

As with a lot of things we see in the movies, quicksand has been largely misrepresented. While it is a bitch to get out of, quicksand won’t really swallow you whole like some hungry creature if you don’t struggle. It turns out that if you don’t struggle against it, half of your body will eventually float and it’s actually possible to get out of it with a little logic and patience. In the same way, I realized that my fears of the accursed friend zone were actually worse than they were.

As seen in this very helpful photo

In hindsight, the circumstances I mentioned above and many others that I have failed to mention weren’t caused by the same thing. They were all caused by a unique set of circumstances that were actually made worse by my paranoia of falling into the dreaded trap of the friend zone. Earlier in this piece, I called myself an idiot for believing in fate and universal conspiracies that work in your favor. Fearing the friend zone isn’t entirely different from that and it’s even more ridiculous since it’s perpetuated by a Ryan fucking Reynolds movie. While my dating skillz are still admittedly flawed in many ways, I have had my share of victories and those have been more fulfilling than my failures have been disappointing. While the fear is always there, my obsession with it has been quite ridiculous over the past years. I’ve finally realized that I am better off building on my victories than mourning my perceived shortcomings.
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Yagi Olaguera is the lead singer of the testosterone laden heavy metal act, Cog, one of the few bands that can simply walk into Mordor.

When he is not moonlighting as a contributor for New Slang or as a ghost writer for women’s fashion magazines, he is guiding foreign students through the many nuances and intricacies of English as a second language.
He has written about physical violence against someone you love and the awkwardness of not sharing a love interest’s taste in music,