When I met my guy friend for coffee recently, he seemed to want to get it over with. This was someone I used to feel comfortable around, someone who had been kind to me. Now even sitting down together felt different, and the change had come after he was the one who initiated something intimate between us.
I'm 23 and he's 28. We met last year, and before this month, I thought we had a beautiful friendship. I believed he found me attractive. I also thought he'd had feelings for me early on, although he denied it. None of that had stopped us from being friends.
In my own head, I even had the rather confident idea that I was out of his league. That was my assessment, of course, not an agreed fact about us. It makes the present situation harder to explain to myself: I thought I understood where we stood, yet I clearly don't understand what's happening now.
Over time, we became sarcastic with each other. There had been room for that kind of back-and-forth. Then, this month, we shared intimate moments for the first time. He initiated them. I haven't described exactly what happened between us, but it crossed a line our friendship hadn't crossed before.
Afterward, the tone of his texts changed. He became angry and defensive, reacting harshly to things I said. What used to feel like familiarity started turning into arguments. It wasn't simply that he wasn't declaring romantic feelings. He seemed frustrated with me in conversations that hadn't been difficult before.
At one point I jokingly told him to tell me he loved me. It was a joke to me, in the sarcastic spirit we'd developed, but he got angry and denied it. I can see how those words might land differently after we'd been intimate. Still, I hadn't meant them as a serious request for a declaration, and his reaction caught me off guard.
The rushed coffee made the change harder to put down to texting alone. In person, too, I felt a distance that hadn't been there before. I missed being able to spend time with him without feeling as though something I said would set off another disagreement.
I asked whether he'd developed feelings. Given what I'd believed about the start of our friendship, the question didn't seem to come from nowhere. But my belief about his earlier feelings wasn't proof, and asking didn't give me any new certainty. He denied it again and got angry.
Maybe he heard expectations in my questions that I wasn't trying to express. Maybe he wanted the physical closeness without anything more. I can't settle either explanation from his reaction. What I do know is that I asked about feelings, and the conversation became about his not wanting to settle down.
He made it sound as though he had plenty of women interested in him. I hadn't asked him to give up other women or commit to me. I'd asked what had changed between us. Somehow, we were arguing over a relationship I hadn't proposed, while the friendship we actually had kept getting harder to recognize.
