Within the context of dating and seduction, obviously.

In my case it was: good relationships are founded on prior long-lasting friendships.

The purpose of this thread is not to rage, but to learn from each other’s bad experiences, as well as providing emotional support for each other.

My story:

When I was young I was a part of several church groups (to be clear, this is not an attack on religion, just sharing my experience) where being friendzoned was idealized as “resilience”, keeping your feelings to yourself as “patience”, and passivity as “trusting God’s plan”.

As you can imagine that lead to me falling in love with women I didn’t have a romantic relationship with, invest months, and sometimes years, of my life to them, only to get heartbroken at the end.

Given that the process was slow on each woman, it took me years to understand it wasn’t working.

Every time I got rejected (after months or years) I rationalized it as “maybe next time, just be patient, trust God’s plan”.

The worst part is, it all began because one of my high school crushes, the first one woman with I dared to act upon my feelings, was a church girl. She lashed out on me for “moving too fast” (It had taken me THREE MONTHS to tell her how I felt) and “not trying to be friends with her first” (which I actually had done).

Back then I lacked the emotional maturity to process the whole ordeal, so I felt extremely guilty for being a bad “suitor” who did things “unethically”, and made her “uncomfortable”.

Dude, I was just an autistic kid, I had no idea what I was doing, yeah, I was awkward, but not definitely not “evil”.

Now, it shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but as a teen, I didn’t have any mentors, or guides to process rejection and how I felt. So I blamed myself and promised I wouldn’t make the “same mistake” again… then the rest is history.