- Heya playa.
I know how much it can suck to be in the friend zone,
simply because I've been there before.
I've told the story of my worst friend zone
experience before
but now here is the aftermath.
How does one move on from being in the friend zone?
Well this is what I did,
so hopefully you can do the same thing too.
♪ This is The Josh Speaks ♪
♪ You're watching The Josh Speaks ♪
- The last time I spoke about my friend zone experience,
I told you guys how I gave my crush a note
saying how I felt about her,
and she gave me one back saying, "Let's just be friends."
From there she met a guy online,
they hung out together,
and when I saw them hanging out,
I took the note that she gave me and threw it at her
only to see it fly very softly in the wind.
I was done being friends with her,
but the very next at school,
she asked me if I would forgive her,
and of course I said okay.
And this where we pick up the story.
She knows I like her and she knows we can't be just friends,
yet I'm gonna see her everyday and talk to her
as if we just are.
I was hurt and upset because I had no chance with her
and I blame it all on The Gordo Approach.
For those of you that don't know,
The Gordo Approach is named after Gordo
from The Disney Channel show, Lizzie McGuire.
Back in the day, I was obsessed with the show Lizzie McGuire
and what I noticed was that Lizzie's best friend, Gordo
was the guy who was always there for her.
Whenever she had problems at home,
figuring herself out,
or even talking to the guy that she liked,
Gordo was always there to share his wisdom and insights
as a best friend.
In The Lizzie McGuire Movie,
Lizzie goes off to Italy and gets confused
with an international pop star.
But all the while, Gordo is there by her side,
loving her but never expressing it.
And the way this story ends is with Lizzie finally realizing
that all this time,
she didn't like the cute guys in her school,
or the international Italian pop stars,
she liked her best friend,
she just didn't see it.
Thus The Gordo Approach.
This is the idea that if you're never direct
about your feelings with your crush
but just act as their best friend,
eventually they'll realize
that you're the perfect person for them.
This is the tactic that I settled on
and it blew up in my face,
and that's simply because I never expressed how I felt,
and when I did,
it was already when she had mentally put me
in her friend category.
So what happened after that day
where we decided to be friends again?
Well, I noticed she started spending a little more time
around one of my best friends
who was snarky and sarcastic with her.
The difference between me and him
is that when I interacted with girls,
I did it from a place where I felt intimidated.
I never wanted to say anything
that might disrupt the situation
or cause them to respond back in a sarcastic way.
For him, he wasn't intimidated by girls.
He would call them out on things,
he would make of them,
he would come up with little nicknames for them,
and they loved it because they would do the same
right back at him.
And that's when I started to notice
that whenever it was me, him, and my crush,
she would spend most of the time
joking around with him,
and would just stand around and watch.
The type of connection they had bothered me
and made me feel jealous,
but what really bothered me,
was when she asked me if he liked her.
When she said that, I had it.
I flipped out on her and asked her
how she could do this to me.
And by the end of that conversation,
I was able to guilt her into going out with me
on a date.
I told my friend that he was forbidden from talkin' to her
because any kinda positive conversation they would have
would hurt my chances.
But I was still slightly happy because, out of pity,
she did agree to go with me on a date.
So after school one day,
I went to go get pizza with her.
Given everything that had been going on between us,
it was an awkward experience,
but we made our way through it.
I didn't make a move,
I didn't really do anything that was outta the ordinary.
The next day in school, she said she had fun
but just reiterated the fact
that she felt we were better off as friends.
At that point, I had to accept it.
I was faced with two potential choices.
One is to choose to be her friend,
to put my romantic feeling aside
and to just be a loyal, good friend.
Or two, just get her out of my life.
And the thought of not having her in my life
made me feel incomplete.
So I, of course, went with option one
and just decided to be her friend.
From there, months had passed
and we continued being friends.
So one day she had invited me and bunch of my friends
to head over to her neighborhood to hang out with her.
This was during the wintertime
where there was tons and tons of snow,
so the buses were taking forever to come.
And as me and my friends waited,
we decided to walk from bus stop to bus stop,
closer to our destination, waiting for this darn bus.
It was an incredibly cold and tiring journey,
and at some point my friends wanted to just go home,
but I told them we couldn't because she called me
and asked me to come hang out with her.
Even though I knew we were just friends,
I still held onto the hope that I invested time
and effort in seeing her,
she would turn around.
And after two hours of walking in the cold and snow,
we eventually got to the mall right by her house
where we were supposed to meet up with her.
So we walked inside, I pulled out my phone
and realized it died.
I had no way of contacting her and I didn't know what to do.
Luckily, I had her number memorized
because I had called her so much in the past,
but neither of my friends had cell phones,
so we had to figure something else out.
There were pay phones on the wall and I was stressing out
because I didn't have any change to call her,
when a cop came over and decided to give me a quarter
to make the call.
I think he saw that I was a teen suffering
from wantitis, and he wanted to do all that he could
to help me.
So I rushed over to the phone,
put the quarter in, picked up the phone to call her,
and waited for her to pick up.
And when she finally did, I told her,
hey, we're here at the mall.
And then she responded with,
"Aw, it's so late now, I don't really wanna go outside.
"Can we just meet up another day?"
I decided to just pretend like it wasn't a big deal,
hung up the phone, and told my friends,
'Kay guys, I guess we can go home.
Anyway, later on that year we ended up graduating
and moving on with our lives.
But I continued to tell this story for years to come
to warn people of my mistakes.
And from here, we can fast forward years and years
into the future to a very specific moment
where I got caught in the same trap.
For those of you that don't know,
one of my best friends was on a TV show
called Married At First Sight,
where he married a stranger at the altar
that he met for the first time.
Everything worked out and it was amazing,
so they continued to record
into their first year of marriage.
At the start of the show,
he had first entered the Fire Academy,
but at this point he was ready to finally graduate.
So me, my brother, his wife, and the entire camera crew
went to go watch it.
It was an awesome experience.
Here we were walkin' around with this big camera crew,
when suddenly I got a message from the girl.
Over the years I had talked to her here and there,
but we mainly kept our lives separate from each other
until this day.
She told that she was also at the graduation
for her boyfriend
and that she would love to meet up with me
to catch up again.
And that's when it hit me,
this was it.
This was the moment after so many years
that I can show her that I finally moved on
and I made it.
I told her we can meet up for a little bit
after the ceremony, because we had to run and go do
some important TV show stuff.
So once the ceremony was done,
I stood there in the hallway and waited.
A few minutes went by and people were clearin' out,
and the camera crew was standin' around thinking,
"Well, what are we waiting for?
"Let's head over to the car
"and get ready for our next scene."
And I told the camera crew, hey look guy,
just give me a minute here.
I gotta do something really important.
We waited another five minutes,
so eventually the camera crew went to the van
to go pack up,
along with my brother, my friend, and his wife.
And I just kinda stood around waiting.
And after another five minutes,
I shot her a message and said,
Hey I'm hangin' out here in the hall,
ya gonna come by?
To which she responded,
"Hey, sorry I'm not gonna be able to make it.
"Maybe next time."
And my heart sunk once again.
Why, why did I try to convince myself
that I was able to move on when in actuality
I was still hung up over everything?
It made me realize this,
that even if you move on from someone,
you still carry a little bit of those feelings with you.
But the important thing is to not allow those feelings
to interrupt your day-to-day life.
There will always be times
where you think about that person and feel that way again,
but feelings come and go,
and you should allow that to be a natural process.
Ya know, when we talk about escaping the friend zone,
we often think of it as a way to flip our crush
to get them to start liking us,
but that's not exactly what it means.
Escaping the friend zone simply means
being able to move on with your life
without letting your feelings for that person
dictate your actions and your behaviors.
I know a lot of you have reached out to me
about being the friend zone
and trying to find ways to make it work
between you and your crush,
but the reality is,
if they're not interested in you
and they just see you as a friend,
the best thing to do is to move on with your life.
I know you can do it
and I wanna help you get there.
As always guys, love and peace.