the spare tire keeps score
my favorite song about the Friend Zone talks of numbers that oppress men — and me
The best song that’s ever been written about the friend zone, that’s captivated most of the Mandarin-speaking population [as this artist is quite mainstream popular], was waiting for me on my Discover Weekly in 2020. I’ve been obsessed with this song ever since, and most of my friends aren’t interested in Mandarin pop enough to embrace it with me. (That’s okay I guess :’()
Its title translated is “Spare Tire.” In Mandarin, this is slang for “the guy who is basically waiting on the girl who friend zoned him to choose him.” He’s her “backup.” The tire in the trunk that she may get around to using someday.
The premise: the song lyrics tell the story of a girl, a good friend of the narrator, who’s frequently talking about interactions she’s having with “another person.” In Mandarin, the word for “he” and “she” is phonetically the same, ta. 他 [for the he particle] and 她 [for the she particle] are in essence gender-neutral until you see the word written. In the opening verses, you can only glean the context that it must be about a member of the opposite gender, because the song is addressed to a “you” the whole time. The male narrator has written the song about the girl’s behavior toward him. In essence it goes something like,
“You say I’m very much like your best friend.
I’m always listening to you talk about your silence with [him].
I say I’m more like your Doraemon.
You have more questions than Nobita Nobi.”
You realize quickly that she’s apparently confiding in the narrator about her implicit love life woes and asking for advice, talking about the things she’s struggling with.
The pre-chorus builds and builds, going on to talk about the offenses she’s always naming that the other dude is doing, basically painting a picture of the exact dialogue she’s referring to. Contrasted with it is the narrator’s reaction, one that conveys how he doesn’t want to know. Speaking of what “hurt he has, that he’s never gotten to say to her —”
And then the chorus that grips me goes:
So how many points does love have, you always ask without stopping
You cry as you’re asking, and fall asleep lying on my chest
So how many points does love require, in order to become a good [relevant] lover?
I can only secretly say in my heart “ho, no, no, no.”
Even if you won’t know that I’m the one who finished singing this song,
Even though you won’t know that I’m the one who finished singing this song,
Even though you won’t know that I’m the one who finished singing this song,
It’s me, the one who’s consistently been behind you…
Ever since I heard that, I wasn’t able to get it out of my head.
"How many points does love require”
I relate to this question! I want to know. Because I score everything in my life. I’m always measuring myself by how many points I’m getting, but especially in areas that I feel incompetent and insecure with. These days, this tendency is most apparent with romantic relationships.
I may not be a dude, but boy did I have a hard time always fearing the “friend zone” growing up.
Every time I thought a guy might like me, he ended up with a different girlfriend or blatantly denying it to my face. It really threw off my radar. I even feel that way now.
So I started keeping score. As a teenager, I started adding a checkmark if I picked up a positive sign from someone, and panicking and subtracting when I saw a lack of a positive sign. I would never act ostensibly to increase the points, or consciously pay attention to the scoreboard. But boy would it be there haunting me. Eventually, I got too tired to consciously keep track and just started assuming I was always more negatively off than I could see.
When I got older and money and followers on Twitter and things like that became relevant, the neurosis got worse. I’d feel subtraction marks hovering over people’s heads if they were ever quiet or if I ever felt like I could not read their minds. What’s funny is the plus marks went away over time, where I’d keep less track of my positive impacts and only look at the potential negative ones. I pay more attention to if I lose followers than if I gain them, to who’s not liking my tweets more than who is.
I’m sort of addicted to my own oppression. My version of the chorus would be, “you’ll never have enough points to deserve love, love will always need more points than you can earn,” and it haunts me constantly. I am sure that the formative memories were feeling like I could never please my teachers or parents enough, that my test scores and grades were always on the edge of almost good enough, that my read of someone’s feelings about me was almost accurate but I’d miss still.
I may not consciously keep score in an accurate way, but I feel constantly like life is grading me, and especially men must be grading me.
It’s weird because I hear men don’t really grade women. Is this true? I have no clue. This song is from the perspective of a man, and I certainly hear men talk about fearing the untrackable arbitrary metrics women put on them. The impetus of perfectionism lies on the man who wants to “track” his progress through numbers, but god if I don’t feel that way too.
It’s weird because I intellectually know I’m not ugly. I know I have a lot to offer men. Yet I’m just really unsure if I “measure up” to the proper idea of a lady worth simping for. Am I too blunt? Too awkward? Too child-like? Too insignificant, for there are so many other women in this world, and it feels like a cosmic accident when anyone could like me?
Men make what it’d take to win them sound so generic, so easy to where I’m like, anyone would impress you then. Many women are cute and charming and have shit figured out. For all the guys that tell me what they like about women, they’re all so similar that it makes me feel helpless that I don’t know what the individual men I want desire. I fear they don’t even know how many points it’d take to impress them!
Because by God… I want to know! I want badly for there to be a quantitative way to understand it.
Because the opposite — that love is such an arbitrary sort of thing that doesn’t have much rhyme or reason — is not literally true. If it were, women wouldn’t have “tricks” or “rules” for getting men to like them. They wouldn’t have ideas about “playing hard to get,” or “wearing more makeup” or “making him text you first.” If people think only men care about quantifying things, that wouldn’t make sense because every woman I know understands how to keep score of a man’s attention way more than me. I feel so incapable of understanding it.
I’ve been the one wailing how many points does love require, but I usually do it alone curled into the fetal position, too humiliated as a woman to admit I don’t know the tricks.
The idea that maybe the man can’t flesh out to me exactly what it would take before he’d commit to me also infuriates me. When men give those generic ideas of what they’re looking for in a woman, I’m like, that’s what it takes maybe for a woman to catch your eye at best.
But what about the crossroads at which you’d decide this love is worth fighting for. Whatever it takes, I would fight for you.
The recent word on the street is that men have to decide this for themselves that they will fight for love, and it has nothing to do with their feelings for someone. That sounds great for independence and detachment, but really difficult to stomach when I think that that means it doesn’t matter who it is. How much you as a man will fight for a relationship isn’t contingent on how much you like the person; instead, it’s about how much you just believe in fighting? Seriously?
So literally, you could be so in love with me at one time, but be not ready to fight because of life circumstances, and then someday be ready, and just go to battle for the first girl that you smile at then? And that’s it? My points, even if I had a lot, wouldn’t matter? It has nothing to do with how many I acquired, how good of a girlfriend I could’ve been?
The thing about listening to songs in a language you’ve only mastered to middle school level is you can kind of tune out its lyrical complexity and enjoy the melody for a while.
But sooner or later, you’ll be curious enough to look up the words. Suddenly, even my limited reading comprehension that takes a second to sink in can’t ignore this song’s very powerful cohesive message. The one that was unconsciously resonating with me for so long.
I don’t know if my trauma is just extremely male-coded, or what. But honestly listening to this song makes me feel understood, even if I have zero faith in the world outside of me.
I’m seeing someone now, but I have to say that part of me really feels afraid to believe in love, since my romantic turmoil has really colored my experiences.
I don’t really understand or grasp someone ever really choosing me. Someone not needing to keep score of my good points because I already passed.
These fears have never stopped me from fighting for love anyway, on principle that I’ll learn something, but I have a feeling that it will take a while before I fully stop feeling at the mercy of a scoreboard.
But despite the cynicality and the trauma, and how deep down I’m constantly steeling myself to continue being disappointed, to continue never being chosen, to continue never understanding the nature of the scoreboard — I’m willing to try to stop seeing myself as the one standing behind someone and look to see when I’m standing in front of someone.
i ❤️ this