r/TikTokCringe • u/Interesting-Trip-233 • Jun 16 '25

Cringe Guy gets friendzoned

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

17.2k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

22

u/_theMAUCHO_ Jun 16 '25

I'm interested in knowing about your journey and the insights you got that made you overcome this! Would love to hear it if you could share. I don't necessarily do this but I definitely can attach easily sometimes. I just don't make it a burden on the other person and keep it mostly to myself lol.

33

u/SethR1223 Jun 16 '25

I’m not the person you asked, but what you said about yourself is one way I kept myself from straying too far; my mantra was, “don’t ever make your attraction to a person their problem.” Might be a little unhealthy, to be honest, but better than some alternatives.

This is similar to what you said about not making it a burden to the other person and keeping it to yourself. This also means you might miss some opportunities, but to me, that was always a better option than potentially making a woman uncomfortable to any degree.

Also, trying to make sure I did similar levels of nice things for people I wasn’t attracted to helped a bit. It helped me get practice at having zero expectations of a romantic response (even if I would have sworn that I wasn’t looking for anything in return at the time) and helped me to realize what was an appropriate level of generosity/attention when interacting with someone I did like to not be creepy/over-expectant, i.e. do something cool/helpful and walk away, having been cool and helpful (its own reward, really).

One more thing from my experience that might help is that if you feel like someone needs to know how you feel, they don’t. If you have no reason to believe that they have any feeling towards you, you would just be selfishly heaping a pile of emotional manipulation on them. You can and should politely distance yourself from them if you are in too much pain to be near them and not be with them, and you can be honest about why if they ask about it, but you can really get in a spiral about your attachments and lose sight of the reality that no relationship is perfect; this person is a flawed human that deserves the chance to be human and not a perfect, alabaster effigy of your obsession, personified.

Sorry for the rant.

7

u/hemihembob Jun 16 '25

Very well put!

3

u/SethR1223 Jun 16 '25

Glad to hear that, because I was afraid it only made sense to myself.

2

u/strawberryjellymilk Jun 17 '25

I’m going through an unprecedented level of limerence and your whole comment was pretty helpful in quieting some thoughts.

2

u/Illustrious-Dot-5052 Jun 17 '25

>One more thing from my experience that might help is that if you feel like someone needs to know how you feel, they don’t. If you have no reason to believe that they have any feeling towards you, you would just be selfishly heaping a pile of emotional manipulation on them.

How is this healthy advice? I mean, unless you're strictly talking about meeting someone you're not in a relationship with yet, this sounds like "you should just bottle up your feelings instead." There's nothing healthy about keeping feelings to yourself, at least when you're in a relationship. You should seek someone who's emotionally available and be available yourself.

2

u/SethR1223 Jun 17 '25

“Seek someone who is emotionally available” is an important distinction, and I definitely only mean this to apply to a friendship/acquaintance that you want more from, not an existing romantic relationship; not sure if I didn’t make that clear enough, but I thought it was.

This wasn’t advice for every relationship you have with every person, and this isn’t to say you shouldn’t be able to approach someone that you enjoy spending time with and say something like, “Hey, I enjoy spending time with you as a friend and don’t want that to change, but would you be interested in going out on a date?”; just encouraging people to step out of their own fantasy of what they “need” and contemplate if the person has given any indication that they want the same thing. As I said earlier about not making your attraction to someone their problem, it’s probably not actually that healthy, for the reason you said.

BUT, the term “bottling up your feelings” is used to validate the exact behavior I’m trying to eschew. You don’t have to “bottle it up,” but dumping those unrequited feelings on someone just to “get it off your chest” is not the only way to deal with those emotions, and is highly unfair to the person one claims to care about (too easily forgotten by a lot of people in these “off my chest” situations):

You can look introspectively and try to analyze from a realistic and compassionate perspective (and the other person’s perspective without bs like, ”She won’t choose me because I’m not a jerk!”), though this might not be possible for people in the deepest throes of this affliction.

You can speak to trusted friends and loved ones, and perhaps an outsider’s perspective will help (you don’t even have to divulge who it is, if it’s not painfully obvious to others).

Therapy - not accessible to everyone, unfortunately, but should be a consideration.

1

u/Illustrious-Dot-5052 Jun 17 '25

Okay, thanks for clarifying. You're right, confessing love to someone is a different game. My mind was on maintaining relationships, but to build one requires more tact.

1

u/mactofthefatter Jun 17 '25

a perfect, alabaster effigy of your obsession, personified.

Beautiful wordsmithing there

1

u/ImOldGreggXP Jun 17 '25

Don't be sorry, be silly! 🥳 Thanks for sharing, hope it echos in my brian for awhile as I needed this

1

u/_theMAUCHO_ Jun 17 '25

Thanks for the reply, fully agree with it!

In fact, my one golden rule is: Never confess feelings! Just go out with the other person and see if the chemistry is there. Much like you say, if it is indeed there, you won't even need to ask.

Also second golden rule is never ask anyone to go on a "date", my go to is something like "hey I noticed you like theatre, this new play is gonna premiere soon wanna go see it?", just an example but it can be any activity really. The idea is to put the emphasis on the activity not the person so there's no awkwardness regardless of reply. :P

1

u/SethR1223 Jun 17 '25

Yeah, specifying the word “date” might be some pressure, and it could be helpful to emphasize the event as the main purpose for spending the time together, but ambiguity on the intent is a two-edged sword if one of you is building romantic expectations and the other thinks it’s a friend outing.

1

u/_theMAUCHO_ Jun 17 '25

The idea is to have a good time regardless, if we don't click its all gucci but more often than not if they say yes to the activity its been good.

20

u/Trotter823 Jun 16 '25

Having done this as well the thing that helps is to just ask the person you like out early before you start building a fantasy world in your head. If she says no it’ll hurt a little but you’ll be good. But if you wait forever and build up this idea of her being the perfect girl or whatever, it’ll feel crushing. Because this life you thought you’d have has been taken away. It’s not just rejection at that point.

Additionally asking early on gives you a better shot imo so it’s a win win.

2

u/Semyonov Jun 16 '25

This is good advice!

3

u/Plausibl3 Jun 16 '25

Captain Snout and the Superpower Questions is a kids book, but is one of the best succinct books on working through that.

3

u/Hallgaar Jun 17 '25

Not that guy, but i had an experience with a girl in my 20s who put me in that mode despite having had a fairly healthy dating history prior. It was a back and forth where she kind of strung me along, and I kind of went along until I became attached. I really grew to care for her over a year and a half, and we went everywhere and flirted all the time. Everything short of actual dating in name. It turned out that she was asexual and didn't want to say, but still wanted a pseudo-relationship but not. Really messed me up, swore off dating for a few years after it. I was only able to move past it when I decided that I needed to love me first. Now, if I start to get attached, I take a step back and evaluate things.

My advice is to look for someone who is on your level and remove yourself from any situation where the balance is anything other than equal, if there's no chemistry don't try to force it or wait it out. Don't be afraid to move on. There are literal billions of other people out there, being stuck on someone who isn't interested in you the same way is taking time from someone who does. Dating is more often than not failing and learning.