CAN MEN AND WOMEN BE FRIENDS? IS THE ICK REAL? AND OTHER QUESTIONS THAT PLAGUE ALISA WU
Ah, the age old question: can men and women really be friends? Alisa used to think the answer was yes, but now she’s not so sure.
It all started when Anton gave Alisa his couch. She needed furniture for her new apartment, so he offered his for free. They spent the entire day together, flirting innocuously until they finally got the couch up to Alisa’s living room. One thing led to another, and the rest lives in infamy.
To Roberson, it makes perfect sense that what started as platonic flirting between Alisa and Anton snowballed into an accidental fling. Because women are really good at picking up on clues… even the ones that are unintentional.
W RIZZ.
‘Rizz’, short for ‘charisma’, is another word for ‘spitting game’.
“If you have ‘W rizz’ it means you’re good at flirting,” said Alisa. The problem with rizz, according to her, is that men are incapable of turning it off.
This is what happened between Alisa and Anton. They’d hang out, he’d flirt, and she’d take him at face value…
“Flirting is a game of giving and interpreting signals,” said Roberson. “And women are socialized to pay attention to these signals in a way that men are not.”
“Society has relegated us to emotional labor. And we’ve gotten really good at it.”
Blythe Roberson
“I think most guys don’t know how to be friends with girls without flirting,” said Alisa. “Which is fine, except eventually someone develops feelings, and then you have a problem…”
FRIENDS TO LOVERS.
“Our society makes it really difficult for men to express their emotions,” said Roberson. “And as a result men don’t know how to form close emotional bonds with women, often mistaking friendship for a desire to be with someone romantically.”
Roberson calls these “romantic friendships“. It’s a friendship that you know has a romantic element, but is somehow not evolving into dating, usually due to a fear of commitment or lack of communication. Some constituent elements of romantic friendships: hanging out all the time, cuddling, and flirting.
“Another defining feature of romantic friendships,” said Roberson, “is that they are extremely fraught.”
“The minute you’ve put your feelings out there, you’ve crossed the Rubicon” Roberson said.
And your only hail Mary… is getting the ick.
THE ICK.
The Ick is an ideology first coined by Olivia Atwood, a contestant in the popular reality show Love Island in 2017. Since then, the term took over social media and was implanted deeper and deeper into the collective psyche.
So what is ‘The Ick’?
“It’s when you’re hanging out with someone and everything seems to be going fine,” explained Alisa,“but then they do something that gives you ‘The Ick’, and from then on they will progressively get more and more gross until just the thought of you and them together makes you cringe and you have to cut it off.”
Unlike a ‘red flag’ which is a serious warning, icks are usually irrational, but infinitely hard to ignore.
ALISA’S ICKS
- chasing a ping pong ball
- running with a back pack on
- owning a pencil case
- putting on a baby voice
- barking/meowing
- using Snapchat as a main source of communication
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