The "I Like You as a Friend" Fallacy
I recently watched all of Catching Kelce , Travis Kelce’s poorly received, ill-fated 2016 dating competition. It’s pretty much EXACTLY like every other reality show with the notable exception that its star is now dating Taylor Swift.
Catching Kelce is basically The Bachelor with Kelce in the lead. If you’ve seen any other reality competition then you’ve pretty much already seen Catching Kelce. It lazily coughs up all the usual reality show cliches, including a star who lets contestants off easy by saying that he doesn’t feel a romantic spark with them and sees them more as friends.
It’s a ubiquitous convention of dating competitions because stars like Kelce have to dump a LOT of women so they better be good at it or their lives will become very dramatic and not in a good way. It’s commonplace because it’s less final than rejecting a potential partner outright. Saying “I do not want a romantic relationship with you” implies a certain finality whereas saying that you want to be friends opens the door, at least a sliver, to the prospect that you’ll have an ongoing platonic relationship that may even be upgraded to boyfriend or husband under the right circumstances.
Catching Kelce calls upon its star to reject forty-nine beautiful women from forty-nine different states before finding the woman of his dreams that he will spend the rest of his life with, or date casually for several months.
If Kelce was brutally honest when he told women to go home he would come off as callous and cruel. If he were to tell a heartbroken loser, “Look, I’m a god among men. I’m worth HUNDREDS of millions of dollars. I’m world famous. I’ve slept with a staggering array of beautiful women. I’m a football legend. You’re a life coach from Tucson. What could we possibly have in common? Go home. I will never see you again” audiences would despise him.
So instead of being candid and blunt with the show’s contestants Kelce instead tells them that he didn’t feel a romantic spark with them and saw them more as friends.
This made me irrationally angry because there was next to no chance that Kelce would have any kind of real relationship with the woman who actually won the competition. He most assuredly wasn’t going to make a point of maintaining friendships with the dozens of nobodies he interacted briefly with years earlier.
The logic behind rejecting someone who wants to have a romantic or sexual relationship with you by saying that you see them as friends is that romantic and sexual relationships require a lot of investment and effort and a romantic/sexual connection whereas friendships require less of an investment and effort and also don’t need a romantic or sexual spark.
So a friendship is ostensibly less work for less reward.
Again, if Kelce had told losers on his dating competition, “We live in different worlds. You’re going to leave the set this afternoon and I am never going to think about you again. I won’t even remember your name” he would seem like a sociopath even if he was being honest.
“I see you more as a friend” is an all too necessary white lie that posits friendship as a consolation prize for people who want more but are doomed to be unrequited in their desire.
Here’s the thing: friendships are INCREDIBLY difficult and I’m not just saying that because I have an extraordinarily difficult time making and keeping friends. It’s a lot of work and time and effort if it’s going to be a real friendship. Friendships aren’t consolation prizes; they’re complicated, fraught, confusing and intense in their own right.
The other place where I see this ubiquitous phrase is in Reddit groups devoted to the awfulness of men, particularly the dreaded Nice Guy who is notable primarily for not actually being nice.
“I see you more as a friend” is a nice, albeit condescending way of rejecting someone romantically and sexually rather than a genuine invitation to friendship. If you can’t make it past a first date or first day of online interaction it seems safe to assume that you probably won’t be inviting them to your son’s Bar Mitzvah or coming to them for solace after a parent dies.
That guy who creeped you out by being way too into swords and talking non-stop about feudal Japan on your only date isn’t going to be a close chum in your twilight years. You’re never going to talk to him or see him again but saying that you like him as a friend makes the rejection a little less painful. Rejection is always painful and teasing friendship as a less intense option doesn’t really make it any less agonizing.
If you genuinely pursued real friendships with everyone you rejected romantically you would have a very strange friend group full of weird romantic and sexual tension and rivalry.
So people will continue to tell people that they do not want to have sex with that they see them as a friend despite knowing damn well that it’s a goddamn lie.
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