Having a female friend as a guy is great

Guys, get yourselves a female friend.

As a guy, fewer things are worse than talking to a girl you’re interested in and finding yourself stuck in the friend zone.

But what if I told you it’s not always a bad thing?

I’m not saying you should let yourself get put in the friend zone, and my advice to most guys who get put there is to simply stop talking to the girl (and maybe sleep with her friends too). But there are benefits to having a platonic female friend, and I think that too many guys overlook this.

The first and most obvious benefit to having a female friend as a guy is that you get to understand things from a woman’s perspective. If you spend enough time around someone, you eventually begin to understand how they think and why they do or say the things they do. More importantly, you begin to understand how to act and speak yourself in order to elicit the desired response from them.

While that’s not to say all women are exactly the same, there are definitely enough key similarities between most of them that your understanding of one woman’s mindset can be applied to others. If you spend enough time around women, you’ll start to pick up on the little things that get their attention, and you’ll be able to use that to your advantage and increase your chances of landing a woman.

Another often overlooked benefit to having a female friend is that women make good wingmen.

Having a male wingman often only serves to sabotage your efforts. For one, if a guy approaches a girl and starts trying to talk up how great their buddy is, the girl’s guard is going right up, and it’s going to take a lot more effort to break through. There’s also the chance that your wingman ends up getting the girl instead of you (I’ve inadvertently done this to friends more than once). Also, why the hell didn’t you have the balls to approach her yourself? By relying on your male friend to talk for you, it shows women that you lack confidence.

None of that applies when your female friend is the one hyping you up to other women. Women like to do three things: Talk to each other, lie to each other, and care what other women think. Having a female wingman takes advantage of all three of those things and basically hands you success on a silver platter.

Women are naturally more social than men, so if a woman starts talking to another woman in a social setting they’re much less likely to put their guard up in the same way that they would if it was a man talking to them. Your female friend will gladly go talk you up to that girl you’ve been checking out, and because women specialize in deception she’ll do it with a natural finesse that most men won’t be able to pull off. An endorsement from a guy doesn’t mean shit to a woman, but an endorsement from another woman is almost as good as Jesus Christ himself giving the thumbs up. Don’t believe me? Put on a fake wedding ring before you hit the bar or club and watch them gravitate to you.

The benefits of having a female friend don’t just stop at picking up women. Female friends also tend to do things like make you food. “Hey AJ, I made homemade mac and cheese last night and brought you some.” “You like rice and beans, right? Here, I made you some.” When’s the last time any of your male friends cooked you anything? Hell, half the time I’m lucky if those losers show up to a cookout with their own beer. Meanwhile my female friends will always ask without fail “What do you want me to make?”

Sure, Juan brings us tacos fairly often, but if I happen to be on a cut he’ll bust my balls and try to guilt me into eating them. My friend/CFO Stephanie, on the other hand, will not only respect my dietary choices, but also take them into consideration when making me food, right down to macro counts. Likewise, my other friend Jackie knows that she can always bring me rice and beans.

Women are naturally givers, because they see emotional connections as an important of friendship. And what better way to develop an emotional connection than making someone food? Guys will share their fries or snacks with you, but women will actually take the time to make you food.

Speaking of giving, with female friends you’re also likely to get gifts. Not just for your birthday or for holidays, but even at random. Stephanie has a thrift store addiction, and it feels like every week she’ll come into my office with something from her latest trip to the thrift store that made her think of me and she just had to buy it for me. Everything from shirts to glassware to knickknacks, I never know just what the hell Stephanie is going to put on my desk this week. We’ve actually talked about starting a YouTube channel for her thrift store finds, even though every time I do YouTube it fails because when I get in front of a camera I have the charisma of a potato.

While you don’t want to repeatedly end up in the friend zone, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have genuine platonic friendships with females. From understanding how they think to picking up women to random acts of friendship that men don’t typically do, having a few good female friends can be a huge advantage for a man. And, yes, it’s entirely possible to develop a sexual relationship with them. Not that I’d know anything about that.

So guys, the next time a woman says “I just want to be friends”, maybe think about taking her up on her offer.