After we slept together, one of my closest friends joked that I could help him find a girlfriend. I told him that hurt. We had been flirting for a while, and suddenly I was supposed to help him meet somebody else.
I'm 23, and he's 22. We were both incredibly drunk when we had sex. It felt intense, and we both said we felt safe with each other. That mattered to me because he was already someone I was close to. There was a friendship underneath what happened, with all the familiarity that brings.
Afterward, he said it would never happen again. He described it as just sex. I was still feeling strongly about him while he seemed able to separate the night from everything between us. The girlfriend joke made that difference hard to ignore: he could apparently imagine me helping with his love life while I was still trying to understand my place in it.
He has said he isn't ready for a relationship. The awkward part is that neither am I. I have personal things I need to work on, and I recognize that. I'm not sitting here with a clear plan for us to become a couple. But being unready for a relationship doesn't make me indifferent to the person I slept with, especially when that person is one of my closest friends.
I feel used, although I can't know that using me was his intention. The flirting, the sex and what we said about feeling safe all belong to my experience of that night. His response afterward belongs to it too. I can't simply keep the closeness and pretend the hurt wasn't part of what followed.
What makes this difficult is that he hasn't disappeared. We're still incredibly close. We talk every day, and he keeps wanting us to stay close friends. The contact is there; the conversation about what happened isn't. We haven't brought the night up again.
I've ended up in a strange position: still in daily contact with someone I care about, while feeling pushed firmly back into the friend role. I don't want to confuse his wish to keep me close with a wish to be with me. He's told me where he stands. Hearing it doesn't make my feelings catch up.
If I bring it up again, I don't want the conversation to become a case for why he should date me. What I haven't worked out is how to say that staying friends matters to me, but the way things are now hurts. Asking for something different between us isn't necessarily asking for a relationship; it might mean admitting that our old closeness no longer feels quite the same to me.
For now, we keep talking every day. I still feel close to him, and I still feel hurt. Underneath those ordinary conversations, the resentment is building.
