I don't know if anybody has ever heard of Psychology in Seattle, but he's a relationship counselor who makes "Psychologist Reacts" videos to reality TV shows. He also has a podcast where he psychoanalyzes various topics.

He did one episode on the Friend-zone, where he went over many reasons that men get friend-zoned and women get dick-zoned, including maybe biological reasons that we can't really know but he sorta speculated about, as well as how young boys are raised to think of women. He made an excellent point about how men are conditioned by Hollywood movies and TV, that put my own experiences with dating men into perspective. I highly recommend you go listen to it! But I'll try to summarize it here.

He basically says that in the traditional Hollywood portrayals of romantic relationships, the man isn't really interesting in any way, and women aren't overtly super attracted to the man's physical appearance. So men are taught that them being attractive or interesting people doesn't matter to women, when the exact opposite is true in real life. The women in movies instead fall for grand gestures of how much the man likes her, and she always responds positively to these gestures. Which makes it so that the man is almost entitled to her romantic attention if he makes a big enough grand gesture.

They also talked about how we culturally recognize and stress the immense pain of "getting friend-zoned." But we never recognize the other side of the coin, which is getting "dick-zoned" for women, which actually may be much worse. The experience sucks for both parties. They talk about ways to avoid this happening by introducing open communication early on. If you feel like you are starting to develop romantic feelings in a platonic relationship, it's better to communicate early on so that you know whether they are reciprocated or if they should be redirected. This way you can avoid heartbreak and losing your friendship.

Let me know what you guys think!