Grasp the Nettle

A redditor is sad he got dumped and asks for an analogy that has been made before to be posted:

I know a girl who broke up with a guy and she told him she wanted to “still be friends.” He said, “No thanks.” She wondered why he couldn’t fall back to being just friends after they had a romantic relationship. I came up with the “McDonalds Analogy” to try and explain it in a simple way that would help all women understand this tough question.
Imagine if you went to McDonalds a lot and ordered a Big Mac Combo meal. A Big Mac, Large Fries and a Coke. You really like this meal. One day, you pull up to the drivethrough and order the Big Mac Combo meal and the girl tells you, “I’m sorry – you can have the Big Mac and the Coke, but you can’t get fries with that anymore.” You think about this for a moment, and sure – the Big Mac is the centerpiece of the meal, but McDonalds has some really good fries and you like their fries with your meal. So you say, “I’ve been able to get fries with that before, why can’t I have fries with my Big Mac combo anymore?” The girls says, “Well, I just think it is better if you only have the Big Mac and the Coke from here on out.”
At this point, a lot of guys are going to go to Wendy’s or BK and see if they can get fries with their combo at that drivethrough window. But there are some guys who REALLY like McDonalds Big Macs and they might think, “If I keep coming here and ordering the Big Mac and Coke, maybe she’ll change her mind and give me some fries with that later.” So they will keep on getting the combo without the fries until the deal breaker happens: One day that guy is going to order the Big Mac and Coke and then he’s going to pull up a little bit to pay, and someone else is going to pull up to the drivethrough speaker and order the “Big Mac Combo” and he is going to hear the girl say, “Would you like fries with that?”
That’s why guys don’t like to be friends with a girl who breaks up with them.

This example illustrates well why romance memes suck. The premise is that even though the person very much likes the friendship, he is going to end it because … because the other person finds sex with them uninteresting? How does this make sense?
One way it makes sense is if you see the other person’s sexual rejection of you as some kind of value judgment of your worthiness, which only makes sense if you partially define your worthiness by how sexually attracted some people are to you.
Because of this poor basis for self-esteem, people will often spend great energy trying to do things to make themselves more desirable to other particular people, as a kind of validation of their own purpose and worthiness. This is silly.
If a person who I enjoy playing Super Smash Brothers with decides they are no longer interested in battling me (because their skill level far exceeds mine or whatever), I shouldn’t try and improve my skill so that they will decide to start battling me again in the future; anchoring my self-esteem so closely to someone else’s desire to engage in a particular activity with me is silly. If being good at Smash is something I value, I should work on improving my skills because of that, because of its value to me; it may eventually be the case that, if I improve enough, the other person will want me to battle with them again. But that shouldn’t be the goal.