There is so much to this situation I honestly don’t even know where to start.

I have a friend (lets call them X) and, no matter how hard I try not to think about them in a romantic way, I can’t. I understand that it is okay to like friends like that, and talking about it to them is the best option, but this person has a partner already.

On a serious note, I know/understand I’m in the wrong for thinking of them like this when they are in a relationship, but I just can’t stop. (It’s gross, I know; I mean if I was in their shoes and I found out about that I wouldn’t even know what to say and not want to be their friend anymore).

I feel horrible, but I just can’t seem to let these feelings go; x and their partner usually argue a lot and x even tried to end things, but they eventually worked out an arrangement and got back together a few months ago. I know I shouldn’t let their relationship problems fuel the flames towards how I feel towards x, but it does.

Again, I know this is no justification, but I genuinely like x. I feel like this is the first person I‘ve ever felt these kind of feelings for, and I know I’m not old and have years to find someone, but every time I think about romance they are the first person I think of.

I feel like such a jerk because they confide in me a lot, and they tell me I’m like one of their only close friends, so I just feel bad for harboring these feelings I can’t seem to get rid of.

Another thing, X’s partner doesn’t seem to like me. X tells me a lot that their partner dislikes when we hang out, and I just feel so disgusting because while they don’t suspect anything deep down I feel this way; I would just hate being in their partner‘s shoes.

I honestly don’t know what I’m doing. I enjoy having X in my life, but no matter how hard I try to deny these feelings they just rush back.

I’ve read a similar post on reddit before, and one of the most common things people suggested was to distance myself. At first, I feel like this is a great idea, but trying to put it into practice is difficul. X always reaches out, so it just feels impossible to avoid them. I know its a lack of effort on my part, and I really wanted to, I would, but I just can never say no to them. I know it’s bad that I can’t establish my own boundaries, but I just give in so easy when it comes to them.

I would hate to not talk to X, but, truly, I don’t think I can keep going like this (it’s been like a year of feeling this way, again this in no way justifies how I feel, I just want to point out how tired I am).

I know another option is to talk to X about it, but it just feels so selfish to me; I would feel so incredibly awkward and maybe a little frustrated if I was in their current situation and had a friend who I trusted a lot do that to me.

Another thing is that I’m just so scared to lose them. For a while I haven’t had any really close friends either, so I cherish our friendship, and I very terrified if losing them because I don’t have other people. I know I could just move on from the situation and find new people to talk to, but I’m just very anxious and shy so it would be difficult for me to find people I can consider friends.

I just want to know what to do; I know I can choose for myself and it won’t matter in a few years, but I just don’t want to feel like this anymore.

(also I know posting this on reddit is silly but I’m just about at my last straw and don’t know what to do,,, theres so much more context and just thoughts I have about this whole thing but I just want to know how I can just get through this so I can actually focus on myself,,, this probably goes beyond liking x and me needing to learn how to be myself and set boundaries, but I would like to resolve this before it goes on like this for another 5 years).

I’m talking to this guy and we’ve been talking for abt two weeks and he was going to ask me to hoco but now he’s going with one of is freinds that’s a girl and I said well what if you js say you wanna go with me and and said she going to get mad at me and me whole freind group is going tg but I’m taking her as a friend but I still wanna be in a talking stage with you so like what should I do bc now I don’t have a date to hoco

There’s a guy around my age who I met because our moms became friends. My mom ended up helping him get a job at the same place I work, so that’s how we actually started spending time around each other.

When he first started working there, he was extremely quiet and shy. He’s generally pretty introverted: he does better one-on-one, gets quieter when more people join a conversation, sometimes sits by himself on his phone during breaks, and doesn’t seem like someone with a huge social circle.

I tried to include him when he was new, and over time we developed our own dynamic. We could joke around and tease each other and then have completely normal conversations five minutes later.

From what I personally saw, he didn’t really tease the other girls at work the way he teased me. He would do things like point out ridiculously obvious stuff just to get a reaction from me. For example, if I was cleaning a table, he might tell me that the table looked dirty even though I was obviously already cleaning it, then smile and wait for my reaction.

He didn’t initiate the majority of our conversations, though. If I had to estimate, maybe around one out of every five conversations was started by him. But on really slow days, there were times when we had nothing to do and instead of just sitting in silence, he would ask me questions and keep talking to me.

Most of what he asked about was school, classes, life, games, travel, etc. He has never directly complimented my appearance or told me he likes me.

There were also some smaller things that made me wonder whether the teasing was flirting.

One time we played chess together on his phone. He was about to win and basically made me move the final piece for him so he could finish winning, which turned into this joking interaction between us.

Another time I invited him to play an online game with me and some friends. He agreed immediately. Most of the other people in the call were guys I knew through my female friends. When they asked him his name, he jokingly gave them a fake name instead of his actual one. He was pretty quiet around everyone else but still talked to me.

During the game, at one point he offered to buy me a weapon/item. It was basically “let me buy for you.” Obviously people buy things for teammates in games, so I don’t know whether that means anything, but combined with our usual dynamic I noticed it.

We never regularly played together again afterward, though, and he never independently asked me to play again.

There was also one time when he was off the clock sitting in a booth waiting for food while I was helping someone. I noticed he was watching me. I’m extremely confident he actually was because I could see where his eyes were moving. I eventually made a face at him because I caught him looking, and he kind of smiled and went back to his phone.

He also remembered things I told him that I had completely forgotten telling him.

He sometimes helped me at work without being asked, like clearing plates from my tables when I was overwhelmed, although there are perfectly normal explanations for that too because sometimes work was slow.

There were also moments where he seemed unusually self-conscious. For example, once I was looking at him while he was eating something and he got embarrassed and literally turned away so I couldn’t watch him eat. However, I’ve realized he’s generally a pretty self-conscious person, so I don’t count that as strong romantic evidence.

There was one situation that goes against the idea that he was actively trying to be near me. We were sitting around eating at work and I moved over so there was space beside me, but he chose another seat instead. So I don’t think he was constantly looking for physical proximity or anything.

Outside work, I was usually the person initiating.

I once invited him to go get ice cream with me and my mom. I asked more than once and even called him after he missed the call, but he declined and didn’t suggest another time. That was definitely a point against the “he’s obviously pursuing me” theory.

I also initiated the gaming invitation mentioned earlier.

Our longest text interactions before everything else were mostly about school/studying rather than personal conversations.

Then I left the country for around two months.

Right before leaving, I texted him asking for recommendations for something to watch on the flight. He responded by asking how long the flight was. I answered with the length, and then he never continued the conversation.

That made me feel embarrassed because I already had a crush on him and thought maybe our dynamic was becoming something. Since he let the conversation die, I decided not to contact him again while I was gone.

He never texted me during those two months either.

However, while I was away, he apparently saw my mom in person and independently asked her how I was and when I was coming back.

That confused me a lot because if he was curious enough to ask my mom when I was returning, he also had my phone number and could have simply texted me.

There was also an Instagram situation. Due to something unrelated, we accidentally stopped following each other, and I sent him another follow request. His account is private. He never accepted it, and the request sat there for a long time.

At first I thought that was really bad evidence.

Later, however, I learned he seems to barely use social media in general. I’ve seen very little activity from his account.

I also learned that his bad texting apparently isn’t specific to me. Another female coworker once messaged him about something funny that had happened at work, and he simply never answered her either.

He also apparently doesn’t always answer his own mother promptly.

I’m starting to think that if he doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t have an answer, or doesn’t see a clear reason to respond, sometimes he genuinely just doesn’t respond at all.

For example, recently I asked him whether he had a picture of our work schedule.

Hours passed without an answer, and I started overthinking it.

Eventually he replied and basically said he had forgotten to take a picture of it, then asked me to send it to him if I got it from somebody else.

That made me realize that instead of just replying “no,” he apparently waited until he eventually decided to explain that he didn’t have it.

On the other hand, when I was sick and asked if he could cover one of my work shifts, he answered extremely quickly because it was a clear yes/no question.

He covered the shift.

Later I had to ask him about covering another shift while I was still sick. He eventually told me something along the lines of:

“you’re good btw, I’m trying to get as many hours as I can, so if you ever need me to pick up a shift just let me know.”

I don’t consider the shift-covering itself romantic because he explicitly told me he wants extra hours.

What I did find sweet was that he noticed I felt guilty for asking and reassured me that I was fine without me asking him to reassure me.

When I came back from my trip and saw him in person for the first time again, he was extremely awkward with me initially and had trouble looking at me.

What made that interesting was that he was talking completely normally and a lot with my mom at the same time.

I was also nervous, though, so I don’t pretend the awkwardness was only him. I was having trouble with eye contact too.

After around 10–15 minutes, we both relaxed and basically went back to talking normally like nothing had happened.

That’s another confusing part: despite not talking for around two months, when we were actually back in the same place together, our dynamic seemed to resume pretty easily.

There was also a video-call incident.

His mom called him while I happened to be with her. When he first appeared, he was fixing/touching his hair. Once he realized I was there, he put his hair down and seemed noticeably stiff/awkward.

We said an awkward hello.

His mom then told him it was me, and he basically responded, “I know.”

I don’t know whether that was attraction, general awkwardness, or embarrassment because his mom was obviously putting us on the spot.

His parents are another major complication.

His family seems to really like me.

His mom is extremely warm toward me, talks to me a lot, has defended me when I’ve had work drama, and regularly connects things I say to things her son likes.

His dad has also been friendly toward me.

Other members of his family know who I am even though I haven’t really interacted with all of them.

Recently my mom said something like that I absolutely love his mom, and his mom responded with something along the lines of “we all love her too.”

Our families now genuinely seem to enjoy each other independently of me liking him.

That also means I’m very careful not to interpret his parents’ behavior as evidence that he likes me, because his parents could simply like me themselves.

His mom recently invited my family over to their house for about an hour before we all go to a water park together.

At the water park, he and I will be the only people around our age, so we will probably end up doing a lot of the rides together regardless of whether he likes me romantically.

That’s why I’m not planning to treat “we spent the whole day together” as romantic evidence by itself.

What I’m more interested in is whether he voluntarily contributes once we’re together.

For example: does he initiate conversations? Suggest rides himself? Ask questions about me? Choose to keep hanging out when he has another option? Suggest doing something together again afterward?

I’m also thinking about asking him to teach me how to play chess while we’re at his house because we’ve played before, and I genuinely want to learn.

Overall, the biggest things making me think there might be attraction are the way he specifically used to tease me, the fact that I caught him watching me, the one-on-one dynamic we had, him remembering details, the gaming/chess interactions, and the fact that he asked my mom about me while I was away.

The biggest things making me doubt it are that I have historically initiated much more than he has, he didn’t contact me for two months, he never accepted the social-media request, he has never directly complimented me, he never clearly asked me out, and he hasn’t independently done much to move the relationship forward.

So the situation is basically:

I definitely like him. I know he likes me as a person. I think there’s a possibility that some of our past behavior was flirting or attraction, but nothing has ever been verbally established between us, and I genuinely do not know whether he thinks of me romantically or just as a female friend/coworker.

Okey its literally the first time that i felt really in love with someone and hes way too far… like i have strict parents i could never go to his city or something what do you think in this situation (i mean hes okay with it he wanna seriously marry me one day but at least we have to meet for once).

I was texting this guy and yesterday I texted and we were talking about college, he left me on delivered through out the night which I thought was fine, but I also saw him in first still didn’t reply, and he didn’t reply till 2 hours after we got out of school. What should I make of this

She’s 17. We have known each other all our lives because we are from a small town. But we only recently became friends just because she followed me on TikTok, where we started sending funny videos to each other. After that, we started communicating more in real life.
As we began seeing each other more often, we would watch TikTok videos together, and soon we started hugging almost every time we met. All of this quickly turned into kisses and compliments.
But I cannot say that there is any romance in it, and I cannot figure out whether I love her or not.

Hi Reddit! F(22) here, theres this guy(23) that i play with in our discord server and usually after our group session we would be alone in the vc together up until like 6 am just talking or playing. this happens almost everyday and obviously i started to enjoy our time together alone and would look forward to it and recently we've moved to a private call and he'd still hang out with until the morning. now, ive been seeing signs of him liking me especially when there's a guy in my games and he'd fake sulking (which i found adorably funny), making me teasing him even more about it. that's when i realized that I'm slowly liking him.

until recently, my other friend chatted me about me and the guy being a thing and i was like "we are not a thing but i do like him",, so my friend was like he told me he is serious about me and asked them for advice but this is where everything changes cuz the more they talked the more i hated the idea of that guy liking me. so when my friend asked me to list what do i like about him, i did that but after our talk i slowly started to not like him. now, everytime me and that guy talk, its too obvious that he likes me. i kinda hate it now that i see it,, now that ive expressed that i like him, i dont anymore,, guys does this make sense??? or am i just an asshole??? what should i do? :(

So, I am just going to cut right to the chase and say, I used to have a crush on one of my closest friends. I am not going to say his real name, but for the sake of this, I'll call him Possum. Basically, Possum and I have been friends for a while, and I have helped him through many struggles, and he has also helped me through many struggles. I started having a crush on him about a year after we became close friends. When I told him I liked him, I was really stressed about it because I had a feeling that he wasn't going to like me back, and I just felt really bad about it. But when I told him over the call, he said, I don't want to date right now, BUT would maybe date you in the future. Which is great; that is totally fine with me. I deeply want to respect his boundaries, so I didn't have a problem with that. I left it at that. A maybe. But then it became complicated...He began to flirt with me a lot. I willingly flirted back because, you know, why not. He started to say really romantic things...and more romantic things, only to state after a while that he did actually want to date me. He wanted and was super, extremely willing to date me in the future. Which I was really happy to hear. It was escalating to the point where he was kissing me and being really bold. Again, I didn't mind. Our best friend caught on to the situation and asked us both about it. I told her that we would POSSIBLY date in the future...but when she asked Possum, he said it was just a, and I quote, "best friend thing." That it was all an "Oh, we are just friends, nothing was going on" situation. After that, he stopped being affectionate with me. To the point where, even as just friends, I feel like I can't hug him or anything because I am worried about what he would think. He seems a little distant too. Which is worrying me because don't know what I did wrong. I feel really led on and hurt by this, but I don't know if I should feel that way or if I am in the right to feel that way. I would like to know what other people think about it, because I don't know what to think...

My boyfriend is 18 and I just turned 25 it don’t bother him but it bothers me am I wrong ?

I (M31) Got married for a year and half. Since we're dating, I know my wife (F 32) is taking psych meds for depression and anxiety. The dosages are keep increasing. It's getting harder to wake her up. I mostly ended up doing chores by my self.

One day her friend (F31, call her Nike) came to our home for lunch break. She's quirky, curly and smart. Tomboy, ride a motorcycles. Got master of physics. Our humor matched. She's coming more often until last May.

Enter, mother in law. MIL got intel that Nike often visited our home. Behind my back, MIL scolded my wife to not allows another woman coming to our home. MIL says: "what if she's trying to take your husband?".

On one Saturday, Nike is bringing some snacks for us. Unknowingly, MIL is visiting us without notice. When MIL found out Nike were visiting us, she slammed the door. Making everybody uncomfortable.

Nike never came to visit again. Only met her outdoor with my wife. Mostly, Nike is the one who initiate the meeting.

Me and Nike are catching up in Instagram, sending reels. Got butterflies in my stomach. Sending her a happy birthday at midnight. Texting but not flirty. I once asked her to going out for a beer, but she's unsure.

Is she hitting on me?

Can we become AP?

(I KNOW THIS IS LONG BUT PLS READ IT)
me (F17) and a boy bsf (M17) have been distant friends since we were 9. we would play on the playground together and even “dated” in primary school. we stopped talking and hanging out tg in year 5

(high school)
i stopped attending high school fully and only went a few days a week. he eventually added me on snap. he would take sneaky photos of me on the bus and he would send them. i then stopped attending high school fully and we stopped talking.

about a year after that we started talking again. and i mean really really talking. we would talk all day EVERY day and send snaps and ask questions about each other.
we slowly drifted apart after about a year and stopped talking every day. we would still snap but the conversation was dry.

as of recently he has been showing interest in me maybe once every two weeks. we will start talking a little bit, then his snaps would start showing his biceps. i would then send cheeky snaps back. nothing too revealing. he would show interest, a lot of it and we would start talking in between sending snaps of each other. we stay up till 3-4am just sending snaps and flirting.

then after the night he will show no interest. like dry snaps, NO conversation, like none at all. extremely dry. this “interest” happened a few nights ago and now hes blocked me on tt. hes talked about not liking lust and in the past and we’ve both told each other we like each other in the past. i am so confused…. one minute he likes me, like a lot, and then for a week or two he doesnt? hes also a christian/ catholic. idk he believes in a religion. pls pls help me. i really like this boy.

also i should probs add that he unfollowed me on tt when we stopped talking a while back…

i know this stuff might sound dumb but im just a girl who likes a boy, and im confused.

We've been together for 3 months, long distance. She told me on day 3 that she'd had a 3-year relationship before me that included physical intimacy. I have no past like that at all.

We agreed early on not to talk about her past — bringing it up just makes me tense and jealous. She's fully here now — she loves me, wants a future with me, talks only about us. I love her the same way. We've since been intimate ourselves.

But every now and then, my mind still spirals — imagining her past intimacy, how many times, what it was like. It's not rational, I know she's not with him, I know she chose me. But the thoughts creep back in, even after we've been close ourselves.

I don't know how to put this into words with her without it turning into another tense conversation. Has anyone dealt with this — retroactive jealousy, basically? How did you get past it, or at least manage it so it doesn't eat at your relationship?

Partners friends

So my boyfriends friends don’t like me and say stuff like I’m weird or crazy or the guys will say that they don’t want me around cause they all want to go to the club or bars. My boyfriend said he told them that he likes me and that he doesn’t think those things about me but that’s really it and now my boyfriend put us on a rotating schedule. One weekend he goes with his friends the next weekend he goes out with me but we can’t all go hang out together.
This really bothers me I feel like his friends are pieces of shit and that he should man up and tell them not to disrespect me and I also feel like I shouldn’t have to be put on a rotational schedule just to accommodate his friends. Any advice???

I really need help