u/Active_Rate_5655

Gonna ramble a lot but the thesis here is that I ruined a close friendship with somebody I held dear by developing feelings and not knowing how to let go when she didn’t reciprocate them.

I (19M) met my friend (I’ll just call her Jane here) in an AP Bio class senior year of high school. We were part of a tight-knit group because the class was very small, only seven people. She was highly respected in academic circles at the school we went to- a highly intelligent and strongly motivated young woman. She was incredible. I felt very lucky and proud to be her peer. We got along well based on shared interests and talked a lot about the state of the world, what we wanted for the future, our pasts, careers, loving to learn, loving nature, etc. I thought she was pretty but at this time I hadn‘t yet developed the feelings that later drove us apart- although I do remember a very warm feeling when she would laugh at bad jokes I would tell. I loved her in a friendly way, I suppose. We remained close all through that year and even over the subsequent summer, when we were able to hang out a few times with other people we both knew. But after summer, things started to fall apart.

A little background. To condense a bunch of bullshit I barely even understand, several factors converged over that summer and into the next year that led to me developing not only immature and unreciprocated feelings toward Jane, but also an unhealthy dependence on maintaining a level of contact that she wasn’t interested in.

Through a series of bad decisions on my part as well as complicating factors in my family life, I made the (unfortunate) decision not to attend college after that summer. I stayed in our hometown, and as more and more people I knew largely stopped keeping in contact I felt increasingly lonely. I have a lot of issues with self esteem and probably some undiagnosed bullshit in my head. I do not say that to excuse what I later went on to do. I hesitate to suggest that I may have underlying issues because I feel like it comes across as me trying to absolve myself of wrongdoing in whatever situation, but I really mean it. I don’t interact normally with other people. I did well toward the latter end of high school because my family put an end to several years of frequent moves and I finally had a consistent social circle to measure myself against. I grew out of some of my awkwardness and became a little bit more capable and well-adjusted. But I grew very dependent on that sense of connection. I needed it, more than I realized at the time. It was a source of validation, belonging. Things I do not give myself in my head, I guess. When that went away, the internal conflicts that I had failed to address made themselves more apparent.

Several months into the subsequent year I had a relatively short attempt at a relationship with another girl I was friends with in school, from the same class I met Jane in. It never really went anywhere but I tried hard to learn more about this girl, take her to do things when possible (she goes to school 3 hours away), learn what she liked, what she wanted. I wanted to respect her boundaries and eventually, feeling that she was uninterested in pursuing things any further and discussing the matter with her in a way I felt was appropriate, we ended things by remaining friends. A big part of what led us to this is that this friend (Terri for contrast with Jane) was at a different level than I was as far as emotional bandwidth/commitment and was also comfortable with much less communication than I was. That will be important later.

I had discussed this situation through text with Jane (who goes to school 3 hours in the opposite direction to Terri) as things developed, as well as maintaining semi-regular conversations about life in general, how things were going for her, if she was seeing anybody, etc. I understood that it was very good for her to leave this town, and I could see that she was happier and healthier and thriving out there. I was happy for her. But under the surface I was also jealous. I wished I could be a part of her being so happy, and over time this idea became warped through the lens of my insecurities into being jealous that other people got to be part of her life and I didn’t. That she didn’t think of me as often as I thought of her. That she was ok leaving me behind when she left this town. I don’t know if it was the cumulative effect of things going poorly for me around the end of high school and the lonelier times after, or having not fared well in my attempt at romance, or both, but that’s where I was at. I know how gross it is, I can see that now. It’s pathetic.

I got to see her in person for winter break and we ate together. It was very good to see her. I could see how much better off she was after getting out on her own. We discussed how things had gone between Terri and I, what she had been up to, issues with her family and with mine. I paid for her meal (something I had tried to do on previous meetings that she had been uninterested in) and I think this is where she started to catch on to me. We talked less after this. I became worried. I should have taken the hint. Should have taken a deep breath, reassessed. But instead I allowed my insecurities to drive me onward. I focused on small things she said when we met. The subsequent decline in contact- the same issue that had made me realize i wasn’t going to have success with Terri. A previous time she had been in town and declined meeting up citing that she was too busy with family, only to later post pictures of her with other friends who she was closer to than with me. She was pulling away, and that scared me. I didn’t want to lose her. I don’t know why I didn’t just separate myself. Be quiet for a while. Understand her and her feelings and put some space between us for the sake of our friendship. It would have been so easy to save it. But instead I was selfish. I was scared. I was desperate and I did something I should have known would destroy it all. I wanted to feel wanted, wanted to be needed. I wanted her to stay. If not the others, then at least her.

A few weeks later I shot my shot. Knowing what her answer would be but still holding onto that scrap, that shred of willfully ignorant hope. It was a shitty confession too. Like, even if it wasn’t a horrendously gross thing to do I just absolutely fucking failed. It was so transparently insecure. I basically unloaded all the shit I hate about myself onto her and asked if she would be with me anyway. What a fucking loser move. She tactfully turned me down and said she wasn’t interested in being more than friends with me. I don’t even remember what I said, probably something dripping with desperation and cowardice. Then she REALLY stopped communicating.

A couple weeks later I sent her a HUGE apology text. I stayed up crafting this thing like it was an important final and it was still shit. I basically ranted incoherently about how poorly I had done at confessing and then asked why we weren’t as good friends as we used to be and asked if things could really go on this way. To which she answered my question quite succinctly by saying we should just move on separately and stop talking. Go figure.

This was devastating to me. I said I was sorry and went on about my day. About a week after that I saw her at the store I work at. It was obviously really awkward when we ran into each other. She brushed me off as tactfully as she could and went on to talk to other people in the store. I turned around and went to her, asking if I could talk to her since we wouldn’t be any more going forward (not a good thing to do, I know) and she agreed. I bumbled around and tried to stammer out some kind of apology but it wasn’t complete, wasn’t sincere. She basically told me to shut up and not to talk to her again. She said I was clearly obsessed and it made her uncomfortable. That really fucked me up. Badly.

Overall I really just fucked the whole thing up at every turn. I made every bad decision I could. I made my insecurity, my issues, into her problem. She was how I thought I could hide from them, so I cannibalized my relationship with a respected friend and colleague in a vain attempt to cover my own ass. To chase that feeling I had grown so used to. To avoid dealing with myself. What a fucking mess I made of things. I’m so sorry for how I treated her. I cant eat the rest of the day if I see her in town. I worry all the time that I’ll run into her again. Her friends look at me like a creep now. I deserve every bit of it. I know how maladjusted I am now. All it cost me was her respect.

I can’t fix what I did to her. It was foolish and cowardly and I hate myself even more for it. But all I can do now is move on. I’ve deleted her number and I’m staying off social media, which is probably good for me anyway. I stay away from her if I see her in public and I try not to obsess over how things went. I regret it tremendously, but I try not to talk people’s ears off about it. Nobody is obligated to be my therapist about it. It was a shitty thing for me to do. Probably the thing I regret most so far in life. I feel so awful. I never thought I was capable of something like this. I base so much of my identity off of being respectful, polite, friendly. If not capable, at least dependable to try. I used to pride myself on being able to be good friends with women. What the fuck have I become? How did it happen so fast? I don’t know. I’m trying to live more decisively now. I don’t want to stay in this town another year. I’m making more effort, working harder, taking more risks. I’m trying to stop relying on my feelings so much. I don’t get to just feel shitty about myself and have that excuse the things I do. I don’t get to just sit in a corner and say I hate myself and then not work out and not get up early and not make hard decisions to make progress on my goals and have everything work out for me. I’ve grown used to the self-sustaining cycle of mediocrity, but this has taught me that it’s not just my life thats affected when I choose not to be at my best. It affects other people too. Sometimes severely. I may never get to truly apologize to Jane. She may never know that I really did love her, in a platonic sense, at one time. She may go the rest of her life thinking of me as a creep. But I have to be ok with that. The best thing I can do for her is to leave well enough alone, and work ceaselessly to be better. If I am incredibly lucky, perhaps one day she and I will meet again and I can tell her with an unclouded mind that I know what I did was wrong and that I am sorry for the pain I caused. We’ll never be as close as we were then, and we’ll certainly never be together. But if I work hard, maybe I can show her I’m not the person who did that to her anymore.

This was very long and self-indulgent. If anybody read this whole thing, thank you. It’s a silly thing to do to put this out there on the Internet. I guess it just feels good to acknowledge that I know I did wrong.

Gonna ramble a lot but the thesis here is that I ruined a close friendship with somebody I held dear by developing feelings and not knowing how to let go when she didn’t reciprocate them.

I (19M) met my friend (I’ll just call her Jane here) in an AP Bio class senior year of high school. We were part of a tight-knit group because the class was very small, only seven people. She was highly respected in academic circles at the school we went to- a highly intelligent and strongly motivated young woman. She was incredible. I felt very lucky and proud to be her peer. We got along well based on shared interests and talked a lot about the state of the world, what we wanted for the future, our pasts, careers, loving to learn, loving nature, etc. I thought she was pretty but at this time I hadn‘t yet developed the feelings that later drove us apart- although I do remember a very warm feeling when she would laugh at bad jokes I would tell. I loved her in a friendly way, I suppose. We remained close all through that year and even over the subsequent summer, when we were able to hang out a few times with other people we both knew. But after summer, things started to fall apart.

A little background. To condense a bunch of bullshit I barely even understand, several factors converged over that summer and into the next year that led to me developing not only immature and unreciprocated feelings toward Jane, but also an unhealthy dependence on maintaining a level of contact that she wasn’t interested in.

Through a series of bad decisions on my part as well as complicating factors in my family life, I made the (unfortunate) decision not to attend college after that summer. I stayed in our hometown, and as more and more people I knew largely stopped keeping in contact I felt increasingly lonely. I have a lot of issues with self esteem and probably some undiagnosed bullshit in my head. I do not say that to excuse what I later went on to do. I hesitate to suggest that I may have underlying issues because I feel like it comes across as me trying to absolve myself of wrongdoing in whatever situation, but I really mean it. I don’t interact normally with other people. I did well toward the latter end of high school because my family put an end to several years of frequent moves and I finally had a consistent social circle to measure myself against. I grew out of some of my awkwardness and became a little bit more capable and well-adjusted. But I grew very dependent on that sense of connection. I needed it, more than I realized at the time. It was a source of validation, belonging. Things I do not give myself in my head, I guess. When that went away, the internal conflicts that I had failed to address made themselves more apparent.

Several months into the subsequent year I had a relatively short attempt at a relationship with another girl I was friends with in school, from the same class I met Jane in. It never really went anywhere but I tried hard to learn more about this girl, take her to do things when possible (she goes to school 3 hours away), learn what she liked, what she wanted. I wanted to respect her boundaries and eventually, feeling that she was uninterested in pursuing things any further and discussing the matter with her in a way I felt was appropriate, we ended things by remaining friends. A big part of what led us to this is that this friend (Terri for contrast with Jane) was at a different level than I was as far as emotional bandwidth/commitment and was also comfortable with much less communication than I was. That will be important later.

I had discussed this situation through text with Jane (who goes to school 3 hours in the opposite direction to Terri) as things developed, as well as maintaining semi-regular conversations about life in general, how things were going for her, if she was seeing anybody, etc. I understood that it was very good for her to leave this town, and I could see that she was happier and healthier and thriving out there. I was happy for her. But under the surface I was also jealous. I wished I could be a part of her being so happy, and over time this idea became warped through the lens of my insecurities into being jealous that other people got to be part of her life and I didn’t. That she didn’t think of me as often as I thought of her. That she was ok leaving me behind when she left this town. I don’t know if it was the cumulative effect of things going poorly for me around the end of high school and the lonelier times after, or having not fared well in my attempt at romance, or both, but that’s where I was at. I know how gross it is, I can see that now. It’s pathetic.

I got to see her in person for winter break and we ate together. It was very good to see her. I could see how much better off she was after getting out on her own. We discussed how things had gone between Terri and I, what she had been up to, issues with her family and with mine. I paid for her meal (something I had tried to do on previous meetings that she had been uninterested in) and I think this is where she started to catch on to me. We talked less after this. I became worried. I should have taken the hint. Should have taken a deep breath, reassessed. But instead I allowed my insecurities to drive me onward. I focused on small things she said when we met. The subsequent decline in contact- the same issue that had made me realize i wasn’t going to have success with Terri. A previous time she had been in town and declined meeting up citing that she was too busy with family, only to later post pictures of her with other friends who she was closer to than with me. She was pulling away, and that scared me. I didn’t want to lose her. I don’t know why I didn’t just separate myself. Be quiet for a while. Understand her and her feelings and put some space between us for the sake of our friendship. It would have been so easy to save it. But instead I was selfish. I was scared. I was desperate and I did something I should have known would destroy it all. I wanted to feel wanted, wanted to be needed. I wanted her to stay. If not the others, then at least her.

A few weeks later I shot my shot. Knowing what her answer would be but still holding onto that scrap, that shred of willfully ignorant hope. It was a shitty confession too. Like, even if it wasn’t a horrendously gross thing to do I just absolutely fucking failed. It was so transparently insecure. I basically unloaded all the shit I hate about myself onto her and asked if she would be with me anyway. What a fucking loser move. She tactfully turned me down and said she wasn’t interested in being more than friends with me. I don’t even remember what I said, probably something dripping with desperation and cowardice. Then she REALLY stopped communicating.

A couple weeks later I sent her a HUGE apology text. I stayed up crafting this thing like it was an important final and it was still shit. I basically ranted incoherently about how poorly I had done at confessing and then asked why we weren’t as good friends as we used to be and asked if things could really go on this way. To which she answered my question quite succinctly by saying we should just move on separately and stop talking. Go figure.

This was devastating to me. I said I was sorry and went on about my day. About a week after that I saw her at the store I work at. It was obviously really awkward when we ran into each other. She brushed me off as tactfully as she could and went on to talk to other people in the store. I turned around and went to her, asking if I could talk to her since we wouldn’t be any more going forward (not a good thing to do, I know) and she agreed. I bumbled around and tried to stammer out some kind of apology but it wasn’t complete, wasn’t sincere. She basically told me to shut up and not to talk to her again. She said I was clearly obsessed and it made her uncomfortable. That really fucked me up. Badly.

Overall I really just fucked the whole thing up at every turn. I made every bad decision I could. I made my insecurity, my issues, into her problem. She was how I thought I could hide from them, so I cannibalized my relationship with a respected friend and colleague in a vain attempt to cover my own ass. To chase that feeling I had grown so used to. To avoid dealing with myself. What a fucking mess I made of things. I’m so sorry for how I treated her. I cant eat the rest of the day if I see her in town. I worry all the time that I’ll run into her again. Her friends look at me like a creep now. I deserve every bit of it. I know how maladjusted I am now. All it cost me was her respect.

I can’t fix what I did to her. It was foolish and cowardly and I hate myself even more for it. But all I can do now is move on. I’ve deleted her number and I’m staying off social media, which is probably good for me anyway. I stay away from her if I see her in public and I try not to obsess over how things went. I regret it tremendously, but I try not to talk people’s ears off about it. Nobody is obligated to be my therapist about it. It was a shitty thing for me to do. Probably the thing I regret most so far in life. I feel so awful. I never thought I was capable of something like this. I base so much of my identity off of being respectful, polite, friendly. If not capable, at least dependable to try. I used to pride myself on being able to be good friends with women. What the fuck have I become? How did it happen so fast? I don’t know. I’m trying to live more decisively now. I don’t want to stay in this town another year. I’m making more effort, working harder, taking more risks. I’m trying to stop relying on my feelings so much. I don’t get to just feel shitty about myself and have that excuse the things I do. I don’t get to just sit in a corner and say I hate myself and then not work out and not get up early and not make hard decisions to make progress on my goals and have everything work out for me. I’ve grown used to the self-sustaining cycle of mediocrity, but this has taught me that it’s not just my life thats affected when I choose not to be at my best. It affects other people too. Sometimes severely. I may never get to truly apologize to Jane. She may never know that I really did love her, in a platonic sense, at one time. She may go the rest of her life thinking of me as a creep. But I have to be ok with that. The best thing I can do for her is to leave well enough alone, and work ceaselessly to be better. If I am incredibly lucky, perhaps one day she and I will meet again and I can tell her with an unclouded mind that I know what I did was wrong and that I am sorry for the pain I caused. We’ll never be as close as we were then, and we’ll certainly never be together. But if I work hard, maybe I can show her I’m not the person who did that to her anymore.

This was very long and self-indulgent. If anybody read this whole thing, thank you. It’s a silly thing to do to put this out there on the Internet. I guess it just feels good to acknowledge that I know I did wrong.