I tried moving on from her quietly for months and it’s not working, any advice?
I (early 20s M) developed feelings for one of my closest female friends and now I genuinely don’t know if I should confess, disappear for a while, or just force myself to move on quietly.
When I first met her, I just thought she was beautiful. Nothing but a harmless crush. We met through mutual friends, and we always met/talk when the grp was meeting or in the grp chat. One day I sent her a post accidentally nd that’s when we started talking. Later down the line I asked her to hang out, she said let’s do it nd I told her I haven’t asked the grp yet to which she said “no I don’t want u to call them”, I thought ok no harm in two friends going out , but later on it developed into hundreds of other hangouts with just the two of us, after we started actually spending time together alone, I realized we clicked insanely well. Our conversations never felt forced, awkward, or draining. We could talk for hours without even noticing time passing.
Over time she started opening up to me emotionally. I became the person she would talk to about both happy and sad things happening in her life. Because I’m a very closed off person nd a girl was caring for me so much, I became emotionally invested very fast. I started noticing every time something was wrong with her, trying to cheer her up, helping her whenever she needed something, etc.
At one point she was feeling homesick, and I literally cooked her favorite food for her, I don’t cook for others. I realized afterward that I was treating her differently than I treat basically everyone else in my life.
The problem is since we talk a lot, ik she wud never like me in that sense, nd recently she told me she is into someone else as well.
There was one moment where she left me standing alone to go sit with a friend of mine, and seeing how happy she looked with him genuinely hurt me more than I expected. That’s when I realized I was way deeper into this emotionally than I admitted to myself.
The thing is, she never actually led me on. I never confessed my feelings, so from her perspective we were probably just really close friends. She also genuinely cared about me as a person, which honestly made it harder to detach.
I tried distancing myself before by deactivating social media for a while because I knew I was getting attached, hoping that hot girls don’t pay attention that much, but she reached out to me on text. I also tried talking to other women and using dating apps, but I kept losing interest because mentally I was still stuck on her.
Now I’m at the point where I feel emotionally exhausted. Staying close to her is making me fall deeper, but I also don’t want to hurt her by randomly disappearing.
Part of me wants to send a long confession just so I can finally be honest and move on. Another part of me thinks that’s selfish because she probably already likes someone else and it might just emotionally dump everything onto her for no reason.
The third option is just quietly logging out of everything and disappearing for a few months so I can detach and stop emotionally revolving around her.
Has anyone been in a situation where distance was the only thing that actually helped? Or is disappearing without saying much a terrible idea? Nd if you have a different suggestion or perspective as to what shud be done, im all ears.