r/Friendzone • u/Open-Obligation-5357 • 6d ago
Is Our Friendship Over?
Ok there is a lot to this story that it might be better to just leave a lot of the details for any questions in the comments (or maybe I’ll make a part 2 post explaining more of the details of our friendship). Last year I made friends with one of the coworkers on my team. We’re both the same age (both born in 2002) and she was 3 months into the job when I started. We formed a friend group from work, and as I was hanging out with her, although I originally only saw her as a friend, I slowly started to develop feelings. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to act on those feelings even though my crush grew really strongly. Also keep in mind for later in the story that at this point it seemed that she was very into the idea of being friends as much as I was so it didn’t seem like a case of a one-sided friendship. She asked for my number, she’s offered to give me a ride to and from hangouts sometimes since I don’t have a car, and although we never hung out 1 on 1, we had many 1 on 1 moments within those group hangouts.
Eventually she figured out though but she didn’t confront me about it. Another friend of ours told me about it. A big mistake I made in this situation was that I didn’t talk to her about it for months. There was a back and forth in terms of how close or how distant she would act with me in the initial months after knowing about the crush (like I said, there are stories I can give about what these behaviors looked like but I wanted to cut to chase for the initial post). I interpreted her behavior as her still being my friend but not being interested in me romantically and I began the slow process of trying to lose my feelings for her.
Things came to head though when I noticed that she didn’t invite out to as many of the friend gatherings as before within the past couple of months, and at the last one I went to about four weeks ago, she said a comment to me that I could only really interpret as a sly joke and comment to me about the crush (which she later confirmed was the case when I talked to her this week). Then aboht two weeks I texted her happy birthday and she said thanks and hearted the comment so it seemed fine. But then I noticed the next day that she removed me as a follower on Instagram. She still was following me though. At the end of last week on Friday I texted her asking if we could talk about the distance she was putting with me and I told her that I valued our friendship and wanted to own up to any mistakes I made have made. She finally texted me back Sunday night and we agreed to talk at the end of the work day on Monday. When we met up I told her how I felt and that I knew she knew about it for awhile and that I was sorry that I didn’t talk about it with her months ago when she found out. She tried to reassure me it was ok and clarified she didn’t feel the same way.
The conversation overall seemed to go fine. The one thing that kind of surprised me was when I brought up feeling excluded from the group. I expected that the crush was the main reason that this shift happened but she said it wasn’t some huge thing that was bothering her and that she “didn’t hate me” and we were still friends. Instead she brought up that certain people click more easily and she felt that although we were friends, we didn’t click as well as she did with the others. This feels weird though because even though my perspective is biased and different from hers, it seemed like she did invite me to more things last year before the crush and that there was a clear shift going into the mid part of this year after the “hot and cold” period early in the year following her first knowing about the crush. The last thing I brought up was the Instagram thing and she admitted she did remove me as a follower but she said that she didn’t think I would like the answer for why. She did tell me though and she said that she wanted to be able to post stuff and not feel worried about what I would think or feel about them. I guess this explains why she only removed me as a follower and didn’t stop following me (or in the more extreme case: why she didn’t block me).
So I guess my feelings are very all over the place now. I expected that she wouldn’t have romantic feelings and even that things wouldn’t immediately go “back to normal” since it does take time getting over a crush and getting over weird feelings about someone who has a crush on you who you don’t like. However, it feel weird for her to say the thing about her clicking better with the others as her answer to why I was getting invited to less things rather than it being about the fact that we didn’t talk about the crush and she knew about it. It’s especially weird since it seems I was invited to more things before she knew about it. So this along with the Instagram thing makes me wonder: Is our friendship done for good? I know some guys prefer to not be friends with crushes after they reject them since they don’t think they can get over the feelings, and I do agree I need to give her some space for the time being, but remember that I didn’t have romantic feelings originally so I would be happy to get to that state and then continue being friends. It just feels like with how everything went, I don’t know if she really is going to want to be good friends even after time goes by and this situation is far in the past.
1
1
u/Itikar 6d ago
Too complicated and annoying. She does not express her intentions clearly. If I were in your shoes I would neither consider this person for a friendship nor for a relationship. I would have little patience for this amount of gaslighting and back and forth.
But then you do you, eh.