My best guy friend and I live close to each other, so we see each other most days. We’re very close. He brings me along to family events and introduces me to his friends. I’m part of his life in ways that feel familiar and meaningful to me.
He has also tried to have sex with me a couple of times. We haven’t had sex. When I try to talk about it beforehand, he tells me he isn’t romantically attracted to me.
That’s the part I keep getting caught on. I understand the words individually. Together, in the context of our friendship, they describe something I don’t quite know how to recognize.
For me, romantic attraction is deep friendship plus sexual attraction. There may be other feelings wrapped up in it, but those two things are central. If I’m close to someone, want them physically, and enjoy having them involved in my life, romance seems like a fairly natural word for it.
Apparently, that equation doesn’t work the same way for him.
I don’t think an invitation to a family event automatically makes us a couple. Friends meet families. Friends meet other friends. Still, those invitations sit alongside our closeness and his attraction to me, and I struggle to understand what he experiences as missing.
I can take rejection. I’m not looking for a hidden meaning that cancels out what he’s told me. He says he doesn’t feel romantically attracted, and I hear that. I’m trying to understand the distinction rather than talk him out of making it.
It matters because we haven’t taken that next step. When he tries to move things toward sex, I want to be able to talk about what that means before anything happens. So far, those conversations have brought me back to the same unfamiliar dividing line.
Can someone feel deeply connected to a friend, want sex with them, and still experience no romantic pull at all? I believe him when he says that’s how he feels. I just don’t understand what the difference feels like from his side.
