“He’s like a brother to me!”

That is the infamous, dreadful phrase that no guy wants to hear a girl say. All the signs are there: she’s constantly flirty using googly eyed faces and heart emojis when she texts you, wants to hangout all the time and acts as if you’re more than friends, and then she pulls the “just friends” card on you. We all know how it goes. You wait and wait until you finally think it’s a good time to ask if the feelings are there, only to get “I just think of us as friends” thrown in your face. You, my friend, just got “friend-zoned.”

Nearly everyone knows the friend-zone term as a typical way of saying someone wants more than a friendship while the other person doesn’t feel the same affection. According to research done by Psychology Today, men and women have extremely different views on simply being friends. While women think that being nothing other than friends can be a good thing, men surely disagree. Guys feel as if they need closure, and whether it’s being in a relationship or for sexual purposes, it tends to lead to disappointment if the girl doesn’t want the same.

When a guy falls into the friend-zone, we all know one of the first reactions is “girls only like the jerks.” You can be the nicest guy or send us a cute morning text, but there’s something that just isn’t pushing us towards a relationship. On the bright side though, you become even more of our best guy friend in the world when you do those sweet little things.

Whether you’re a girl or guy, everyone has been in the friend-zone at some point in their life, but it’s unfortunately a tad more common for the unlucky gentlemen. It’s believed that once you’re in the friend-zone, then you’ve won your place in the friend-zone for life.

But don’t worry guys, that’s not necessarily true. In many cases, there’s something you could be doing to alter the way we feel about you. There you go, we’re admitting it, it’s not always our fault for locking you in the friend-zone. We’re not as terrible as you think we are after we reject you. Guys, it’s time to stop feeling bad for yourself and attempt to dig yourself out of that faulty friend hole.