Am I being replaced by my friend's boyfriend?
(25, M) I'm somebody who's never had a large friend group. Instead, I had that one ride or die friend beside me that was my everything. Never having good examples of romantic love in my life, I've also never craved a relationship, so the centre of my world was always a best friend. For the past few years it's been this guy that I met at a club a few years back. He's a few years younger, an amazing person, my bestest friend, and everybody thinks we're dating... My friends, his friends, even his homophobic family members. But we always laugh it off. We know we're friends and that our friendship simply runs deeper than most people expect from a platonic relationship. We'll hug, slap each other's ass, flirt with each other in a playful way, but for us it was always all shits and giggles.
This person is somebody I would spend almost every day of my life with whenever I could. We cook together, go on walks together, go to the gym together, clubbing, travelling, you name it. In every plan that I ever make in my life, he's included. In recent years I've heavily reduced the amount of people I surround myself with, so there was all this space he could fill up. And for him, I was his first real friend pretty much ever, I've introduced him to so many people and places and I've always tried to show him the world in a way. I always tried to be there beside him through the tumultuousness of late teens/early 20s (not to say he needed me — he's an incredibly self-sufficient being, but still, I like to think it counts somewhere).
He's recently started seeing somebody, and now they're officially together. He didn't really tell me about the guy until it was all but official, which felt really weird because I was with him almost every day during that period. I've meet the guy super briefly on two occasions, but no effort has been made into us actually meeting which I find odd as I tend to be pretty friendly with my friends' significant others. On top of that, me and my friend have since had a few very emotional tear-filled conversations recently about how much our friendship means to us and how none of this changes our dynamic.
But the dynamic has changed dramatically. He's mentioned how he can't keep track of my plans because he has another person to think about, he's stopped calling me (something he used to do daily, even on days when he knew we'd see each other — heck, sometimes on his way to see me), when I said "hey can I see you tomorrow evening cuz I'll be out of town for a few days" (which he has known about for a while), he said no because he said he had plans "to do nothing" together with the boyfriend, last time I was sick he was at my doorstep in 5 minutes, but the other day I was sick again he didn't even call me once to check up on me.
I called him yesterday because I had something to talk about and before we hung up he mentioned that we should get together to talk about our friendship and dynamic. I got worried, but he quickly reassured me that everything is fine and he just wants to set expectations and talk about our newfound dynamic so I don't get the feeling that I'm being replaced. And while in this sounds lovely and thoughtful, my impression was that we already kind of had this talk (albeit I do feel like stuff has got worse since).
It sounds to me like he is looking to let me down slowly and tell me that our friendship is never gonna be what it was — which I obviously don't mind in the sense that he has a boyfriend now so he wants to spend a large chunk of his time with him, but I've had close friends be in relationships before and this never really a thing that came up. It feels like he'll sometimes find time for me when the boyfriend is working from the office and he has nothing better to do. Or the boyfriend is out of town and he feels obligated to spend some time with me because I know he's alone.
I hate that the friendship has come to this point. It feels like I'm being completely replaced by my friend's boyfriend even though we weren't even together... not in that way anyway. At the same time, I don't want to guilt trip him in any way into spending time with me and I definitely wish nothing bad upon him — I would quite literally rather remove myself from his life than have him feel bad.
Am I at fault here for putting too much of myself into a friendship knowing that that person ultimately really desires a relationship with somebody — something I definitely wasn't able to provide them with? Am I even looking at this from the right perspective? Am I just being selfish and impatient with my friend who's experiencing love for the first time?
Thank you in advance, elder queers ✨❤️🩹