After 45 days of trying to be more than friends, he told me he couldn’t feel romantic love for me. He still thought of me as a good friend. I had spent two years working up the courage to admit I wanted him, and now we were back to friendship.
I’m 24, and he’s 25. We’d been close college friends for three years, with roll numbers near each other. That small administrative detail matters now: we still have to be civil around each other. There wasn’t a clean exit from the breakup into separate lives.
For most of that friendship, I had a crush on him. I thought he was out of my league, so friendship felt like the safer thing to keep. I could have him in my life without risking the humiliation of finding out he didn’t want me in the same way. I also knew he liked another girl, who had turned him down. There seemed to be plenty of reasons to keep quiet.
Except he kept asking. Over those two years, he asked me four times whether I had feelings for him. These weren’t passing questions I could easily pretend hadn’t happened. Each time, I denied it, until the last time, when I finally admitted the truth.
He said he felt something too, although he wasn’t sure what it was. He suggested we get to know each other beyond friendship. After so long assuming romance was beyond reach, there was suddenly room to try.
I knew he hadn’t promised he would fall in love. Still, I wasn’t starting from the same place he was. He was exploring a possibility; I was finally allowing something I’d wanted for years to happen. The same 45 days could carry very different expectations for each of us.
Then he ended it. A month has passed, and I keep getting stuck on the fact that I can’t turn him into a villain. He told me he was unsure before we dated, and he told me when the feeling hadn’t become love. I can recognize the honesty in that and still feel hurt that he asked me to reveal something I’d worked so hard to hide.
My own reaction won’t stay in one place. For a few hours, I can feel almost buoyant: I have good things in my life, I don’t need a relationship to be enough, and he didn’t do anything cruel by being honest. Then that confidence drops away, and I’m crying and wondering what was missing in me. Knowing the sequence of events hasn’t stopped me from taking the ending personally.
Part of me wants one firm explanation, something that would make this easy to file away and move past. But I only know what he told me. I don’t know why the possibility he felt never grew into the love I wanted.
For now, we’re maintaining civil relations at college. He knows I liked him. I no longer have to deny it, but I haven’t yet worked out how to be around him with nowhere for those feelings to go.
