Reminded of the moment I, at 15 years old, took inventory of what I had to offer as a romantic partner.

I remember, as part of it, standing facing the mirror after showering, and thinking,

"Well."

"You'd better get real funny."

Being undiagnosed didn't help. Living as part of a culture that expected me to understand a bunch of unspoken things didn't help.

I had a full-on, snot-bubble sobbing breakdown in my 20s when I realized how thoroughly I had been lied to about romance by my culture.

My history with that is part of why the discourse around "the friendzone" hurts.

There is /absolutely/ a toxic idea that men are owed sex for basic decency, and nothing I say is meant to take away from that bullshit.

My experience, though, was being surrounded by people who /

would tell me how good a friend I was, how much they wish they could "find someone like me."

While apparently I didn't count as "someone like me."

I remember pouring out my time, my attention, my emotional energy into being there for people, far above and beyond what I would do for a friend.

Thinking, based on that cultural lie, that someone would eventually see me as someone worth loving.

I have never been so lonely as I was as a teenager.

Feeling needed but never wanted. Feeling constantly... used.

The few times I managed to screw up the courage to be explicit about my feelings, it went horribly, up to and including someone straight up just laughing at me.

I /completely/ understand why the idea that "male friends are only nice to me to put kindness tokens into me until sex comes out" is gross, and violating, and dehumanizing.

That was never my experience of it, though.

My experience was being a hurt, scared kid, a product of a /

family rife with divorce and substance abuse and mental illness, a kid not understanding why his brain didn't work like everyone else's,

Just desperate for anyone else to think of him as worthy of love.

No, "friends" wasn't "just as good." I've never understood that idea.

What I understood when I, as a teenager, heard people talking about the Friendzone, was that.

Being told, "You are useful to me to be in my life, but you'll never be good enough to earn a reciprocation of your feelings."

I'm lucky that I also had empathy, that I was able to hear folks talking about how it felt to be the target of unrequited and entitled affection.

I'm lucky that I managed to adjust, and spend my twenties being a much healthier person.

I'm glad I had the opportunity to grow.

I still carry that pain, though. That deep in my bones knowledge that I was unloved and unlovable.

It surprises me any time something suggests otherwise. Any time someone describes me as attractive, or decides to do a sex at me.

I worry about talking about this, since I know a lot of people have deep pain from the other side, being made to feel a victim or object of someone else's (possibly violent) emotion.

Whenever I do talk about it, it incites a certain amount of... anger? with folks.

I try not to.

This. These words.

"I will never be worthy of love and I'm sexist for even wanting that." https://twitter.com/icarus_drowned/status/1353425086305480705?s=20

Just... a thread. Thoughts. Trauma, how I do my best to process it.

This is very much not "Won't someone think of the poor mistreated men?"

I'm fully aware that my pain came with, for instance, no threat of physical violence.

I'm not trying to compare pains.

I just wanted to take a moment to remember that pain, and to assert that it was real.

It mattered. It still hurts. I'm still coping.

And because relationships are not finishing schools for half-raised men, it's my responsibility to do so, ideally with a therapist.

It'd be real shitty of me to foist fixing my trauma on anyone else.

God almighty, this. The way that "you should be grateful for anyone showing you any love at all" set me up for abuse and toxicity in my relationships.

Any healthy behaviors I have now are there because I earned them the hard way, crawling out of a pit. https://twitter.com/florist_an/status/1353427898946871296?s=20

tl;dr my teen years were a less entitled version of a Taylor Swift song.

An important point: this isn't a uniquely male experience. As folks are chiming in, it's something that a lot of us went through while grappling with our queerness, or figuring out our identities. It's something we went through because of how our bodies didn't meet some ideal.

That's probably the biggest place where this very real pain can fester in cishet men - the idea that this is a particularly male pain, and it's women's fault, because they're... etc.

I'm glad for the friends and loved ones I had that made sure my response was an empathetic one.

So, as a fat kid, an awkward kid, a queer kid, an (undiagnosed) disabled kid,

Solidarity.

Solidarity with everyone who couldn't make a move, b/c what if [she's not actually gay, and I'll ruin everything] | [he's just been humoring me] | [nobody will think of me as sexy]?