I Fell in Love with My Best Friend…And He Didn’t Feel the Same Way

I sat next to my best friend on her queen-sized, bed, surrounded by a mass of pillows doing what best friends do best: heart to hearts.

Her words stuck.

“As painful as it was, losing that friendship wouldn’t have mattered if you hadn’t learned anything.”

We were rehashing the loss of one of my closest friendships. My best guy friend. (Let’s call him David.) A guy who in the course of our three-year friendship I realized I was in love with.

We laid out the details like a deck of cards. What had gone wrong. Mistakes made on both sides. The scars it had left. What I learned from it. How I was planning to let go and move on.

I had done the unthinkable. I had written an emotional note to David ending the friendship. To top it off, I sent a text. A text saying I couldn’t be friends anymore. The emotional, disgruntled note came later when I felt the need to explain my text. (A note, might I add, that was written while I was slightly tipsy. Something I highly warn against: drunken notes, texts, smoke signals, or really communication of any kind.)

Rewind to 2016 when I realized that I had feelings for my best guy friend. After three years of a great friendship — of long phone calls, of making fun of each other, of seeing each other at our worst, of challenging each other to grow, of rooting for each other, of me calling him to come save me — I realized I was in love, and it scared the crap out of me.