Men Who Hate Their Female Friends

Okay so there’s this thing about some men and I need to talk about it as I cannot keep it to myself anymore.

It’s funny by how some men treats their female friends as in the women they have no romantic interest in, in some funny way.

These same men that will move mountains for a woman they're attracted to, suddenly develop selective amnesia when it comes to the women they call their friends. You're struggling and he's nowhere to be found but the moment you check on him, he appears like NEPA brought light.

He doesn't remember you told him you were sick, doesn't notice when something is clearly off with you but a new girl enters the picture and suddenly he's texting good morning, remembering her favorite color, asking how her day went with the enthusiasm of someone who just discovered emotions for the first time.

I believe the way a man treats the women in his life when there is nothing to gain, no possibility of romance, is who he actually is.

I’m not saying treat your female friends like your girlfriend. Romance and friendship are different. The expectations are different, the intimacy is different, the dynamic is different. I understand that. What I’m saying is simpler than that and somehow still too much to ask.

Treat your female friends like people you value. Like please abeg, I’m just your friend, just be a decent human being towards me.

Check on them, remember what they’re going through and show up when they’re struggling not because you want something but because they matter to you. Be as emotionally present for the women who have known you for long as you are for the woman you just started talking to or you’re romantically involved with. That’s it. That’s the whole ask.

And if you can’t do that, if basic regard for women only switches on when desire is involved, then what you’re telling me is that women, to you, are only worth effort when they are potential. When they stop being potential, they become invisible.

I don’t hold space for that. I don’t hold space for men who need romantic incentive to treat women like they matter. This is not because I’m asking for grand gestures or emotional perfection but because kindness should not be a reward you unlock with attraction. Consideration should not require desire as a prerequisite. Consideration and kindness is basic human decency but it’s sad too because you cannot teach those things.

There’s just this annoyance from being someone’s friend and realizing somewhere along the line that the friendship only flows in one direction. That you’ve been holding space for someone who doesn’t even know what your space looks like and you can’t even be angry about it in peace because “he’s just like that” or “that’s just how men are”

We’ve already established that he knows how to show up. We’ve seen him do it. We’ve watched him be patient and present and attentive and emotionally intelligent the moment a woman catches his eye. So it’s not that he lacks the ability. It’s that he’s decided, consciously or not, that his female friends don’t warrant that version of him. That they don’t deserve the effort, their feelings are not significant enough, their friendship are not valuable enough to activate the parts of him that he reserves for women he finds attractive.

To some men, I feel like when a woman is just a person standing in front of them asking to be seen as a friend, some men genuinely do not know what to do with that. Some men see friendship with women as something they receive, not something they participate in equally. The woman does the work, provides the emotional labor, shows up, checks in, holds space, and he just exists in the friendship collecting the benefits without reciprocating.

Then they wonder why their female friends eventually pull back, why the energy shifts and why the woman who used to check on him every other day has gone quiet. They never connect it to the fact that people, even the most patient and generous ones, eventually stop pouring into things that pour nothing back.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you cannot extend basic kindness, basic regard, basic human decency to the women in your life when romance isn’t involved, especially when romance isn’t involved, then I don’t even understand it at all.

The women in your life who have chosen your friendship, who have known you without wanting anything from you, who have shown up for you simply because they care, they deserve better than to be with the version of you that never tries.

Being kind and showing regards are not things that belong only in romantic relationships. They're just things you show towards people you claim to care about, full stop.