This is a problem I’ve noticed a lot of women have and it makes it basically impossible to have a normal friendship with them. What I’ve seen is a lot of mostly young attractive women exclusively socializing with men who have some kind of romantic interest in them, and then keeping them at an arms length so they can reap the benefits of emotional intimacy while not having to provide anything in return. It’s essentially habitual friendzoneing but you can’t even really blame the men for it because most women I’ve met like this will actively seek out and try to foster these types of unhealthy relationships.

From the woman’s perspective, these friends are essentially the best of both worlds while being terrible for your long term mental health. It’s impossible to get true support or emotional connection from them because they’ll always just tell the woman whatever she wants to hear to avoid being abandoned.

After enough of this, you’ll eventually get a person who is socially inept, narcissistic, and completely incapable of having normal relationships with others because they have no concept of what a normal friendship is supposed to be like. The extent of detachment from reality I’ve seen trying to be friends with people like this is insane. It’s kind of like being around a person who grew up wealthy actually. They perceive any type of criticism as a personal attack and normal friendship behavior as not pulling your weight or not being emotionally available enough.

So yeah. Has anyone else seen or experienced this? Is there a name for it? And do you think it’s a problem specific to women or have you seen this type of behavior in men too? I’ve never seen this type of behavior acknowledged before so I’m interested to see what ya’ll think.