Ten Years of Friendship with Men as a Black Woman:

A Study in Emotional Labour, Fatigue, and the Quiet Grief of Unreciprocated Platonic Presence Across My Twenties

There are friendships I still grieve. Not for what they were, but for what I believed they had the capacity to become.

In those friendships, I gave without calculation. Offering language where there was none, stillness when everything was loud, patience that stretched long past its natural limit and at the time, it never felt transactional. It felt like presence. Like what people do for each other when they love and respect one another, when they understand that being witnessed- truly witnessed- is rare.

But what I came to learn, not all at once, but slowly and with some resistance, is that my presence was often treated like a service. A reliable current. Something they could plug into when the noise in their own lives became too loud.

Their vulnerability arrived as urgency; mine was met with distance.

It didn’t come all at once. The realisation crept in gradually, politely. A string of moments that seemed small on their own: a message seen but unanswered, a conversation turned back towards him before I had even finished my thought. I started noticing how often the same men would seek me out when things fell apart, but disappeared when it was my turn to unravel.

At first, I made sense of it by naming their pain. I gave them the benefit of every doubt. I told myself they were just overwhelmed. I softened my updates, not because I had less to share, but because I already knew they wouldn’t ask follow-up questions.

Eventually, I had to face it: I was always listening, but rarely being heard.

I remember one friendship in particular. I was young, but sure. I thought I had found a rare thing. Someone who welcomed my care without suspicion, who didn’t flinch when I showed up deeply. I admired the way he moved through the world with intention, the way he talked about his craft, the ease he carried in unfamiliar rooms. He shared his dreams, his family history, his sense of being misread.

I met him there, fully. Not to prove something, but because I believed the friendship held enough value to deserve that kind of energy. I remember once buying and delivering medicine he couldn’t afford, not because he asked, but because I noticed. Because I was listening.

When I eventually named the imbalance between us, his response wasn’t to reflect- it was to retreat. He suggested I was growing dependent. That I may have been developing feelings.

As if the only language a woman can speak to a man is desire. As if friendship can’t exist unless it stays emotionally one-sided.

That ended things. Not dramatically. Just fully. And though the friendship dissolved, the memory of how much I gave lingered.

Another time, I found myself on the other side of something terrifying. My best friend and I had just been mugged- four men. Too fast to stop. Too real to forget. She was injured, bleeding from her scalp. I held her head in my hands while the city kept moving around us. My body was in shock. I hadn’t yet processed the words for that kind of fear, so I did what I always did when something felt too heavy to hold alone- I reached out.

I sent a message to a friend I’d known for years. We met at his 21st birthday, back when I was still trying to find my footing behind a camera. I was invited by his sister, my close friend, and I showed up with my DSLR slung over my shoulder, still learning how to frame a moment. He noticed. Said I had a good eye.

That night, I watched him in a way that would become familiar: the way he entered the room like it belonged to him, how easily people gravitated towards him. There was a clarity in his voice when he spoke, a kind of steady self-certainty I hadn't grown into yet. Over time, we formed a friendship that existed separately from his sister. One-on-one, he was quieter. Thoughtful. He furrowed his brow when he was deep in thought. Laughed with his whole face when something caught him off guard. His eyes would linger on the ground when he was unsure of his words, then snap back up like a dare when he meant every bit of what he was saying.

I was always watching in the way people do when they care. When he mentioned an artist he loved, I’d go find their work. If a story lit him up, I let him tell it twice, thrice. I didn’t need to be needed. I just wanted to be there.

So when I told him what had happened, the assault, the aftermath, the blood in my hands. I wasn’t looking for a rescue. Just a reply. Some signal that I wasn’t holding it alone. But none came. No message. No check-in. Not even a one-word response.

His silence wasn’t just for the day. We didn’t speak again for just over two years.

By the time he reappeared, I had enough distance to understand what his absence had revealed. I wrote to him, not in anger, but with the kind of clarity that only comes after sitting with disappointment for too long. I told him how he made me feel. How his absence landed. How hollow it was to show up again without any acknowledgment of what had been left undone.

He responded with an update on his life. A long list of things he’d been managing, the weight he’d been carrying, the reasons he hadn’t been able to respond. There was no apology. No mention of my pain. Just an explanation written for his own comfort.

Over time, I found myself overthinking every gesture. What used to feel like natural expressions of care, a kind message, an "I miss you," a consistent presence, started to feel like risks. I would reread texts before sending them, questioning whether they sounded too affectionate, too eager, too much. I’d hesitate before saying “I love you,” even platonically, because I’d seen how quickly those words could be twisted into something they weren’t meant to be.

I began to edit myself, not because my feelings weren’t genuine, but because I had learned that genuine often wasn’t safe. That vulnerability in male friendships came with consequences. Being misread, being dismissed, or being accused of wanting something more and it wasn’t just about them projecting romance onto me. It was also the absence of reciprocity. The messages left on read. The silence where care should’ve been.

So I started holding back. I'd water down my joy. I'd second-guess reaching out first. I’d shrink my love into something quieter, something less likely to be misinterpreted. I began measuring my words against their likely reaction instead of their actual meaning. And even when I voiced how exhausting it was- how confusing, how one-sided- I was met with understanding in theory but not in practice. No shift. No deeper communication. Just more silence I had to fill with guessing.

The result was a kind of emotional contortion. Simple things became complicated. Intimacy felt like a tightrope. I wasn’t just managing my own feelings, I was managing theirs, and their perception of mine. And it left me wondering if there was still room to be loving without being misunderstood. If there was still room to be me.

This pattern played itself out again and again. New names, same equation. Men who wanted to orbit intimacy without ever landing in it. Who loved being seen but rarely offered sight in return. Who took kindness as default and presence as guaranteed.

And they loved my mind, too. Deeply, vocally, often. They would say it plainly: That they admired my insight, loved how I thought, how I articulated my views on the world. They called it brilliant. Asked for it often. Asked what I thought about art, politics, race, religion, how I’d phrase something they were struggling to say. They mined my perspective like a resource. Something rich and renewable. But it didn’t always feel like they loved my intelligence because it made up me, a person worth knowing deeply. It felt more like I was a vending machine for thoughtful answers. A clown at the edge of the circle, pulling ideas from the sky like ribbon from my sleeve. My mind was not something to hold- it was something to use.

And it wasn’t always malicious. That’s what made it complicated. Sometimes it was subtle. Sometimes it was unconscious. But the result was the same: I was the anchor they depended on, but rarely remembered to hold.

Not everyone has the language for love…but some never bother to learn it.

We tend to treat romantic relationships with men as the highest or most worthwhile kind of connection we can have with them. And that belief (whether we admit it or not) trickles down into how we value, or devalue, platonic ones. It shows up in how men are socialized to interact with women too. So often, there’s this underlying current of “if we’re not going to date, then what’s the point of getting to know you?”. As if being known, just for the sake of knowing someone deeply, isn’t sacred enough on its own.

But men can be just as disappointing, just as absent, selfish, or emotionally unready in platonic relationships as they are notoriously known to be in romantic ones and that shouldn’t be something we excuse just because it wasn’t a “love thing.” Friendship is a love thing. I’ve learned that it deserves the same intentionality, the same accountability, the same depth.

What makes this more complicated is that we’ve been socialized (sometimes subtly, sometimes violently) to excuse bad behavior from men in our lives in ways we never would from the women we love. We extend endless grace to emotionally unavailable men, but place strict standards of care, communication, and presence on our mothers, sisters, girlfriends. We make room for failure and inconsistency from men. It’s a double standard that doesn’t just hurt us- it reveals how deep patriarchal residue still runs, even in our most personal relationships.

When we hold men to better standards in friendship- emotional consistency, presence, reciprocity- we’re not just asking them to be better to us. We’re asking them to be better people. People who know how to show up. People who learn to love women beyond what they can take from us. Beyond being their mother, their partner, their therapist, their mirror. People who can stand with us in the world before they ever become husbands or fathers, because they’ve learned how to value women as full human beings first.

I don’t carry bitterness, but I carry memory. I carry what it felt like to reach across a gap and find nothing waiting on the other side. I carry the conversations I rehearsed and the questions I stopped asking.

And I carry a small handful of names that don’t live in that pattern. Men who have loved me, platonically and without condition, for over a decade. Their presence reminds me that reciprocity is real, that tenderness isn’t gendered, and that not every man who enters your life will ask you to mother their emotional neglect.

They are the exception. And I thank them for it.

People talk about heartbreak like it only comes from romance. But the dissolution of friendship- particularly one you have invested your full self into- can level you.

I have learned to tell the difference between someone who wants to be close to me and someone who wants access to what I offer. I have learned that my capacity to love deeply is not a flaw. It is a fact and I no longer give it away without first asking: is there room for me here, too?

There’s still one more genuine connection left in me, I know that. One more offering I will make, when the time and place feels right. But for now, I am resting. Letting what I carry settle. Not because I am empty, but because the love I hold needs a soft landing and I learned not to gamble it where there is no place for it to root.