[Anonymous]

I’m secretly in love with my best guy friend and it’s driving me crazy. We’ve become so close that I’m the person he always comes to for advice whenever he needs it, especially for advice on what to do about about being in love with a girl that doesn’t return the feelings (Ironic huh?). He really is my best friend and I don’t know what I would do without him and he feels that same way towards me. We both rely on one another so much.

I know that he only thinks of me in a sisterly way and really is caught up on this other girl. But at the same time, the girl that he always describes wanting to end up with is the exact description of me. He comments about how ridiculous it is that neither of us has a boyfriend/girlfriend and we tell each other we love each other every night. Of course, he probably has no idea that I mean it in the way I do. All of our family members and friends even say how great of a couple we would make but we always laugh it off (or at least I do when I’m around him and he does). We’ve talked about how awesome it would be to move in together (as roommates) because we get along so well and understand each other in a way that I didn’t even think was possible. Deep down I have a feeling that we would be perfect for one another if we just gave it a chance, but I really don’t know if we’ll ever get to that point.

I’ve been feeling this way towards him for over a year now and it’s just getting to the point where I don’t know what to do. I had hoped that I’d eventually move on and find someone else if I just stayed quiet, kept it to myself, and continued to be a good friend to him while waiting for my feelings to pass. That obviously hasn’t happened like I hoped. I tried to convince myself that maybe it would happen one day, but until then I owed it myself to move on. The only thing is that I don’t know how or what to do anymore.

Part of me wants to continue suffering through this silently if that is what it takes to be sure that I don’t lose my best friend. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel like thats a pretty pathetic thing to do to myself. I don’t know whether I would feel relieved mentally to just to go ahead and tell him or end up feeling worse by making things weird between us and being straight up rejected (since that’s what I suspect would happen). I’ve also considered trying to somewhat cut him out of my life in an attempt to move on, but I know that it would really hurt him to do that without explaining to him the situation. Thats not fair to him and I know it. I mean, if he did that to me without an explanation, I know I would flip out. Both of us would lose the person we rely on the most.

I’ve never been in such a ridiculous situation before in my life. To be totally honest, I’ve always had a really hard time opening up and allowing myself to be open to love, and I hate the fact that now that I finally have, its with the one person I wish it wasn’t. So please, please, please, give me some advice here. Normally, I would go to my best friend for advice on something like this and it kills me that I can’t.

[April Masini, your AskApril]

You’re hurtling towards permanent inertia, and if you don’t do something differently, you’re going to continue to [i]suffer silently[/i], as you yourself put it.

My advice to you is to take yourself out of this sister-brother relationship you seem to have with the man you have a crush on. Amp up your sexuality and your flirtation. If you don’t act like his sister, he won’t think about you as his sister! 😉

Don’t continue to be someone who has such a hard time opening up in life, that you continue to choose men who aren’t available so [i]you don’t have to[/i] open up! If you want more from this guy than just a friendship, then be the woman he wants to date, not just a friend.

If you don’t, eventually this guy [i]is[/i] going to find a girlfriend, and it’s either going to be you, or it’s going to be another woman who isn’t so crazy about his having a best friend who has a crush on him — and believe, she’ll figure it out. So the idea that you can just stay his best friend for ever and ever isn’t going to work out.

Be your best girlfriend self, and I bet he’ll respond as a boyfriend. 🙂

[Member]

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