Friend Zone is Not Christian

Friend zone sabotages your chance to a real relationship

During my recent visit to the small Chinese Church in my hometown where I was baptized, I found that most of my Church peers have married each other, settled down, and propagated. That place is now infested with noisy toddlers and couples with a drowsy look of mild content. I personally also have to admit to having an alarming number of Asian friends and relatives who met his/her spouse at Church or fellowship.

This unromantic state of affairs (as are most things Asian) is shockingly anti-climatic compared to the American Church I know, where large droves of single eligible girls and guys produce sob stories of love (or lack thereof) and agony. Indeed, I don't know of any young(ish), Christian, non-Asian couple who met in Church. Analyzing the underlying mechanisms of this American phenomenon is beyond the scope of this post that is already too long.

What does friend zone have to do with the Christian faith?
But all these beg the important question: what does friend zone have to do with the Christian faith? I guess the point is, they don't. At least not theologically. I am not going to list all the arguments on how friend-zoning is unBiblical or aBiblical. I am just going to state the effects. If you are Christian and you find yourself identifying with the hallmarks of friend zone, you are either using your fellow Christian or being used by your fellow Christian. Friend-zoning is based on dishonesty - one side is pretending to not have romantic intentions when s/he is dying to marry the other, while the other is willfully feeding that illusion to feed his/her own selfish ego. A dishonest relationship is frustrating, unfulfilling, and detrimental to your spiritual well-being. Dishonesty with yourself results in dishonesty with God. A dishonest person cannot receive God's blessing, because he cannot distinguish between blessing and curse.

Friend zone sabotages your chance to a real relationship
No matter how you spin it, friend zoning is a cruel and inhumane sport, and a gigantic waste of precious time. For the "giving" side, pining after someone clearly uninterested obviously leaves you mentally unavailable for someone else who may be interested. But don't think that the "receiving" side is having a sweet deal. No matter how many times you declare that you two are platonic (actually, it is precisely because you feel the need to make these random declarations), almost everyone else will take you two as a couple or at least an ambiguous pair (because it is harder to fool others than yourself). No respectable Christian, heck, no respectable human will want to be in a relationship with someone in another ambiguous pseudo relationship. Due to denial, the receiver may not even realize this. But the effects are real, so off the receiver goes to the giver again to whine about his/her lack of dates, while the giver is comforted that s/he is still available.

A jolly cycle, or orbit. Or maybe I should say, a black hole that is best avoided. If you are in it already, you can and should end it now (read Why the American Church is one giant jolly friend zone and How to break the Christian friend zone by faith - ...eh sorry haven't gone round to write these awesome posts yet :p So run along now and read my other awesome posts).