First off, men and women cannot be friends, or at least not in the way that most people perceive same sex friendship to be. Now the natural resoponse to this from a well conditioned AFC is "I have lots of female friends" or "what are you trying to say, I can't have female friends, they're all enemies?" Which of course is the standard binary (black or white, all or nothing) retort and the trained AFC thinks anyone suggesting that men and women's relations as friends could be anything less than equitable and fulfilling is just a neanderthal chauvinist thinking thawed out from cryogenic freeze in the 1950s. But you are incorrect - not because you'd want to actually be a woman's friend, but because she cannot be yours. There are fundamental differences in the ways men and women view friendship within their own sex and the ways this transfers to the concept of intergender friendship.
Quite simply there are limitations on the degree to which a friendship can develop between men and women. The easy illustration of this is that at some point your female "friend" will become intimately involved with another male; at which point the quality of what you perceived as a legitimate friendship will decay. It must decay for her intimate relationship to mature. For instance, I've been married for 11 years now; were I to entertain a deep freindship with another female (particualrly an attractive female) other than my wife, my interest in this woman automatically becomes suspect of infidelity - and of course the same holds true for women with man-friends.
It's not to say that you cannot have female aquaintances, or that you must necessarily be rude or ignore all women with contempt, that is binary thinking once again, but it is to say that the degree of friendship that you can experience with women (as a man) in comparison to same sex friendships will always be limited due to sexual differences. Most men will only ever engage in friendships with women that they find attractive and/or interesting which of course is colored by their attraction to that woman. Now I'm sure you'll play the "not in my case" card and attempt to tell me how much an exception to the rule you are, to which I'll say, even if you legitimately are, it makes no difference. Because the very nature of an intergender friendship is ALWAYS going to be limited by sexual differences.
Even the best, most asexual, platonic, male-female friendships will be subject to mitigation based on sex. The easy example is that I'm sure you'd be jealous and suspect of your girlfriend were she to be spending any "quality time" with another 'male-friend'. It's simply time spent with another male who isn't you and you'll always question her desire to do so in favor of spending time with you.
So get out of your head now that there even is a so called "friend zone" with any woman. You're either intimate with her or you're not. Women have boyfriends and girlfriends, if you're not ƒucking her, you're her girlfriend, simple as that. There is no friend zone - there is only the limbo between you being fooled that a girl is actually a friend on an equitable level to your same sex friends, and you understanding that as soon as she becomes intimate with another guy your attentions will become a liability to any relationship she might want to have with the new sexual interest and she puts you off, or you do the same when you become so involved with another girl.
