A newly-graduated friend sent me this, as part of an e-mail about the difficulty of making friends after moving to a big city:

I’m now trying to “friend-date” whenever I meet a female (or male) who seems platonically cool. I have an easier time with males, but I don’t think the single ones ever intend to be friends with me from the beginning… mostly beta orbiters I guess.

Think about it this way, from the guy’s perspective: you’re exceedingly hungry. As hungry as you’ve ever been. And you can smell a delicious curry. You can see it. You’re very hungry. You’d love to eat the curry. But you can’t eat the curry.

The metaphor isn’t perfect—women have agency and curries don’t, among other things*—but it should impart the basic urgency single guys feel and the reason why single men who don’t want to be “just friends” also don’t want to hang out with you as a friend. How badly would you want to go to a restaurant when you’re desperately hungry but can’t eat at the restaurant?

My friend also said:

I found this article recently that was telling guys why they should be friends with the women who reject them for dating, but want to be friends. 1) The guy will become more confident around the type of women he’s interested in. 2) She will introduce him to her hot friends.

While “She will introduce him to her hot friends” is true in theory, it isn’t true, or very often true, in practice (based on my experience, anyway). More often, when a girl I’m interested in declines my affections, at best she sets me up with friends who are substantially less attractive than she is, and frequently says they’re “cute” and promises that I’ll “like them for their personality.” Unfortunate euphemisms lead to hurt feelings all around. Actually, my feelings don’t get hurt, but the feelings of other women sometimes do.

The hot girl’s friends also often know the hot girl turned the guy down, and that sends a powerful negative signal. If the guy isn’t good enough for the hot girl, why should he be good enough for her friends? Again, I won’t say that no straight guy has ever gotten the female-friend hookup, but I suspect that the female-friend hookup is more mythologized than actualized.

I’m familiar with the the beat orbiter mindset because I spent a lot of high school being one—but that’s because I was an idiot who didn’t know any better. I finally stepped back from that behavior, wondered why the hell I was doing it, and stopped. Non-adaptive behaviors should be altered. Most self-respecting guys who are dumb enough to go through a beta orbiter phase leave that phase by the time they graduate from college, if not earlier. Not all do, however, and you’ll occasionally run into 35-year-old men with the emotional temperament of 15-year-old boys in the thrall of their first serious, unrequited infatuation.

I’ve also had girls be the female equivalent of beta orbiters. I say “girls” here because, like men, adult single women usually grow out of this behavior, and if they’re attracted to a guy, they either make their move and see where it goes or they find a guy who is interested in them, instead of pointlessly pining after the unavailable. Straight American women seem to be more susceptible to acquiring beta orbiters than straight American men, while women seem to be, on average, more deluded about their “real” relationships with their supposed male “friends.”

One thought experiment might clarify your “friendships:” imagine that you’re lying in bed, wearing lingerie or nothing, and your male friend comes in. Does he leave or partake? If he leaves, you’re real friends. If he partakes, he’s probably not.

The attention of beta orbiters is kind of flattering to women, but it’s also mostly pointless; if you’re in the game, so to speak, you want to focus on the game, not the crowd. This is true of both sexes, whether gay or straight, but it seems like a lot of people have trouble admitting it.

(As a side note, literature is full of idiots pursuing pointless love for no particular reason: think of Gatsby and Daisy, or Robert Cohn and Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, or any number of 19th century novels, or The Sorrows of Young Werther, or Romeo and Juliet (which has the advantage of Mercutio, until he dies; it’s his death that’s tragic, because he’s hilarious—”I will bite thee by the ear for that jest” and “for the bawdy hand of the / dial is now upon the prick of noon”). In each case, the obvious thing for the pursuer to do is get over whoever he or she is obsessed with and find someone better / more available, which are much the same thing. That’s a problem with Gatsby and Sun in particular: both novels are constructed around idiotic, self-defeating sexual behavior that contemporary teenagers often see glorified in pop culture and eventually must learn to overcome. The writing and style in both novels are specular, but their plots leave much to be desired, since the obvious thing for Jay Gatsby and Robert Cohn to do is get over Daisy and Brett Ashley. If they do, however, one no longer has a novel. But we shouldn’t admire guys who do things that are clearly dumb and sub-optimal.)

It may also be hard for attractive women to become genuine friends with a guy who already has a girlfriend because most girlfriends won’t want a rival—especially an attractive rival, sniffing around their campfire—so to speak. The reasons should be obvious. The major exception, however, occurs when the girl herself is bi, or at least interested in some girl-on-girl experience(s), but third-wheel situations among relative strangers seldom seem to last long.

This kind of misunderstand seems to be incredibly, stupidly common; I occasionally read the reddit.com/r/relationships section, which is filled with people like “jaqueinabox” who say

I have a friend who I’ve known for about four or five years. A couple years ago, when my boyfriend at the time and I were on a break, I invited him to a social [. . .] I dropped him off at his car, but we ended up making out for a few minutes before I told him I had to stop (I never really do stuff like that and I was incredibly uncomfortable with it.) [. . .] When my boyfriend and I broke up for good, my friend started insisting we hang out more. Go to movies, go out for dinner, go to his place and watch movies, sending me texts with “xoxo” and “;)” in them, and it feels a lot like dating. [. . .] I still see movies and hang out with him because it seems rude to say no.

She’s wrong: it’s actually rude, both to herself and, to a lesser extent, the guy, to keep going out with him. In the thread, I wrote that “Directness is beautiful, both for you and these ‘guy-friends,’ who are not actually friends.” The other day a Reddit commenter wrote, accurately:

Most male friends become friends with attractive women with hopes of getting with them. Usually, when it doesn’t happen or she gets into/is in a relationship, they step back. When she gets out of a relationship, they usually try again.

The best movie scene dealing with this dynamic is the famous bit from When Harry Met Sally:

The contemporary term of art for these guys is, of course, “beta orbiter.”

I do want to clarify one point: It is possible for men and women to be authentic friends (I have a bunch of authentic female friends). It’s just much more unusual than many young straight women want to think it is. Many young straight women want to lie to themselves, or simply like deluding themselves, about male “friends.”

Authentic cross-gender friendships are great and they are no less worth cultivating than any other friendship. But don’t lie to yourself and don’t go into authentic friendships with the purpose of trying to covertly shoot for more.

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* As far as I know.