The worst cliche in pop culture is the suggestion that platonic friendship is just true love waiting to happen. I don't say worst only because it's lazy, which it is, but because it's a dangerous, false and cruel idea for entertainment to promote.

Chuck Klosterman, in his 2003 book "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs," described this as the "When Harry Met Sally" problem, referring to the romantic comedy that "made it realistic to suspect your best friend may be your soul mate, and it made wanting such a scenario comfortably conventional."

Plenty of movies and shows before and since have validated the notion that a friend you happen to develop romantic feelings for is just a future lover who doesn't realize it yet. Almost every long-running television series featuring an opposite-sex friendship has at some point fallen back on the "let's hook them up" storyline. It makes sense you can't fill 11 seasons of "Friends" or "Cheers" without eventually pairing off some of the leads.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the best and most important show ever created seriously, fight me on this had a clever way of handling the inevitable sexual tension between its lead female and male characters: it abstained.

Fans of the show last week celebrated the 20th anniversary of its premiere on the WB network. Plenty has been written in the media about this milestone, and there is a lot to say about the Joss Whedon series' formal inventiveness, its fierce feminist message, its powerful LGBT advocacy, its subversion of narrative tropes and its role in normalizing geek culture.

But what I remember most from the shows seven-year run is a warning about mixing friendship and more-than-friendship. In the finale of the first season, Xander (Nicholas Brendon) finally musters the courage to confess to his best friend Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) that he loves her. He delivers a well-rehearsed speech asking her to a school dance, but she says no.

Buffy, taken aback by the unexpected advance, feels terrible about rejecting her friend. Xander, his pride wounded by the rebuke, says something mean and stomps off, leaving her hurt and confused even though she didnt do anything. Later in the episode, Xander recognizes that his friendship with Buffy, and all the demon-fighting they do together, is more important than his precious feelings and saves her from death at the hands of a vampire master, as one does.

Its a delicate handling of something almost everyone encounters, some of us more than others. An even better episode in the second season found Xander empowered by a misfired love spell that made him the object of lust for every girl in school, including his onetime friend-crush, Buffy, where he learns that getting what you think you want might actually be a nightmare.

The show should be mandatory viewing for every high-school student. If Id seen and internalized it when it originally aired, instead of when I fell into a Netflix rabbit hole at about age 30, I might have avoided years of dumb behavior.

For the longest time, I was one of those dudes who would always fail romantically, blame everyone but himself, then use the failure as an excuse to become embittered instead of addressing an underlying terror of intimacy. I was a Xander, which is to say, a jerk.

A Xander will complain about the friend zone as if its some dark corner of the Buffyverse to which all nice guys are banished. He'll will read an embarrassing number of books by self-described pick-up artists (any number above zero is embarrassing) not to learn about human behavior but to gain tools of revenge. He'll act like a victim even though hes the one ruining relationships.

Age cured this self-affliction, but not soon enough. There arent many things from my teens and 20s I want to do over, but I would go to the Hellmouth and back for a few more youthful years uncursed by Xanderness.

Troy Reimink is a writer and musician who lives in west Michigan.

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Troy Reimink: 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' helped me become less of a jerk - Traverse City Record Eagle