I’m sitting with Jack on a bench at the top of a big hill. We stay until the blue sky turns pink and then purple and then black – and then there’s blue again, only this time it’s not the sky but my hands.

I tell him I’ve watched so much of the sentimental American family drama This Is Us that I’ve started to think I’m a member of the Pearson family. He shows me the callouses on the tips of his fingers from pressing against guitar strings.

I’m frustrated because all of my houseplants have died. “You’re a good person to be cold with,” he says. I tell him that the dad on This Is Us says something similar on the Thanksgiving episode. I Google the quote and read it out to him.

“I’m thankful that we’re all safe and there’s no one in the world that I’d rather be too hot or too cold with.”

“That’s awful,” he says. I throw back my head and laugh with my entire face.

“Out of nowhere, he was like, ‘I think about you all the time’,” my friend Ella says when she rings me on my way home from the park.

Her friend Sam isn’t speaking to her anymore because after they drunkenly kissed she said she didn’t see him in that way.

“I keep on trying to ring him but he won’t pick up. He kept saying that I ‘led him on’ or that I ‘friendzoned’ him, like yeah? I thought we were friends?”

“That sucks,” I say, because I’m not very good at giving advice.

I never take it either.

I’ve been accused of friendzoning men ever since the first time I kissed one. That was back in 2008 and his name was Rhys. I went to one of his parties and he poured me some of his parents’ vodka and replaced what he’d taken with water.

He gave me his jumper while I shivered in ripped tights at the bus stop. I went to see his band play at a pub called The New Roscoe just off a dual carriageway. My mum gave me a lift and she couldn’t find it for ages because most of the letters had fallen off the sign.

When he kissed me I had to lean further and further back to make room for his tongue in my mouth. Afterwards my lips were glossy with his spit. “Stay,” he said when I told him I was going to find my friends.

In the crowd he put his arms around my stomach from behind and it felt like a trap. “I’m not sure I’m feeling it on a romantic level,” I said to him the next morning.

“Right,” he said. “I’m pretty gutted to be honest.” And then a few minutes later came a much longer message, one that contained that word: “Friendzoned.” I found out later that Rhys told my friend Vicky I was a bad kisser, which is probably true because I was fourteen.

I grew up, I kissed more boys, I stopped needing my mum to drop me off places, but I carried on hearing that word. “Friendzoned” was the last thing men said before storming off; it was the subject of texts I was too scared to open.

When I left rooms it felt like I could hear people saying it about me through the walls. “She’s a cock tease,” was another. Once, a friend-of-a-friend said it to me at a bar as he pulled the glass of wine he had just bought me from my side of the table over to his.

He had touched my thigh and then I had told him I’d gotten back with my boyfriend. “Sorry, I thought we were doing rounds,” I said. “Nah, it’s cool, you got your drink,” he replied.

“I wasn’t born yesterday.” Then he drank the rest of the wine and wiped his lips and I went home.

I’m sitting on a wall outside my friend Hannah’s house. I take a sip of my coffee and it’s so hot the plastic lid sears a small pink rectangle into my lip.

“I’ve never heard a woman say she’s been friendzoned,” says Hannah when I tell her about Ellie’s situation.

“I have,” I reply.

“But not in a serious way, women never say it in a serious way.”

I move out the way for a man jogging through the gap in between us. “Why do you think that is?” I ask, watching as he slows down to change the music on his phone.

“Because men feel entitled to sex in a way that women don’t.”

What Hannah said is right. There’s no word for what happens when men don’t like women and we don’t feel the need to invent one because as much as we don’t like rejection, we understand that it’s not something you’re entitled to change.

Being told “no” is inevitable, like leaves falling off trees in winter or occasionally leaving your headphones in a taxi. A lot of men feel differently. That’s why women carry keys in between our fingers at night and get scared about dark shadows bending over our shoulders.

That’s why some of them call themselves incels and get angry at us for not finding them attractive. These men believe their apparent niceness means you owe them something, but niceness doesn’t mean you owe anyone anything except to be nice in return. I would say wanting friendship is nice.

Ella sends me a picture of her and her soon-to-be-ex-friend on a night out when they were at university together. He’s holding her over a big industrial bin pretending he’s about to drop her into it with all the half-eaten bread crusts and chocolate bar wrappers.

She’s laughing because she trusts that he never would. “It’s just shit because we got on really well,” she says. “I miss him.”

I know the pain that Ella’s talking about. It hurts when someone accuses you of friendzoning them because the insinuation is that your friendship isn’t worth very much at all. It tells women that their only value is that of a sexual object.

“Did he even like hanging out with me or was he just waiting to make a move?” Ella asks me over a voice note. “Does he feel like he’s wasted his time on me?”

I didn’t realise how bad the weather was when I was sitting on the bench with Jack until I started to walk home and felt that my lips were chapped and my throat scratchy and my breath coming out in big candyfloss-like clouds.

I hope that if I just want to be friends with Jack, or friends that don’t have sex, that it’s okay and not disappointing enough for him to not want me at all. If friendship is all he wants I would still want to walk up to a bench on a big hill and get cold with him there because I think he’s a good person to get cold with, too.