Unreciprocated feelings for a friend

[EdSaid]

Hey all, I apologize for the length of this post and the fact that I'm not asking the clearest/most understandable questions, but the situation is quite hard for me to grasp so it's difficult for me to lay it out in a really concise manner.

I recently started my second year of college and I've been having some relationship issues with my best friend (we'll call her Elise). I'm in a fraternity and Elise (a senior) started dating one of the brothers in my house (let's call him Gustav, also a senior) around March of this year. They met at a bar and she started coming around the house pretty frequently. They entered a stable relationship that lasted a couple of months before being ended by Gustav due to a weird situation involving him getting drugged at a bar upstate and confronting the demons of his relationships over the course of his trip. While they were dating, I became pretty close friends with her. We texted relatively often and hung out frequently, but only in groups, usually when we were smoking or partying.

After the two broke up, Elise spent a few weeks single and then started hooking up with another guy in my house (let's call him Joseph). During this interim period between guys, I started to realize my feelings for her as we began hanging out more frequently and with fewer people around. She was quickly making her way into my closest circle of friends and I was actually almost to the point of asking her out on a date when she started dating Joseph. It caught me kind of off guard, because while I'm close to both of them, they didn't seem like a particularly great match. Indeed, my suspicions were more or less confirmed: the two dated for approximately a month, broke up (later, I discovered, pretty much because she wanted to hook up with Gustav that night), got back together again for a few weeks, then broke up again (I want to say sometime around early- to mid-July). She broke up with him both times. After talking to her about it, it's partially because they didn't work all that well together, and partially due to the sex.

So once Elise and Joseph were no longer dating (and I had returned from visiting home for a few weeks), we became best friends quickly. We were (and are, to this day) hanging out at least once or twice a day; whenever we both have free time we usually spend it together. We'll meet on campus between classes, hang out after school, do homework together, party, whatever. A few weeks after E & J broke up, we hooked up a couple of times. Both nights, we were both really drunk and the sex was pretty awkward. Over the next week, we had a few really long talks in which I revealed my feelings that I had had for her for a little while at that point. She said I was the most important person in her life, but she didn't want to date me because 1) I'm two years younger than her and she felt like it might be weird (Joseph is the same grade as me and I basically suspect that she's mostly concerned with the sex with regards to this reason); 2) She was worried there would be backlash/drama within the house if she started dating yet another brother after breaking up with Joseph. I wasn't happy about the situation, but I was glad to still have her as a friend and things continued pretty much as usual; and 3) She was worried that if we tried to date and broke up, it would ruin our friendship and potentially all the other friendships she has with guys in the house.

Not long after that (probably mid-August at this point), our frat threw a huge party at which Elise and Gustav had sex again. They did it on a couch outdoors on an upper floor deck late in the night, and apparently Joseph walked out to smoke a cigarette soon after they finished (when they were still incriminatingly lying on the couch cuddling). E & J haven't really talked at all since this happened (J was already pretty upset about being broken up with twice). Since then, E & G have started hooking up pretty regularly. On any given night, I can be hanging out with E and she will ditch me with little to no notice and at best a curt goodbye to go have sex. Even on nights when I'm working (I have a graveyard shift job), if I know that the two are going to hook up I find myself filling with rage and sadness. I feel like I'm fulfilling all of her emotional needs and spending all my time with her, yet she still has (largely sexual) feelings for Gustav and she lets those dominate her feelings for me as her best friend. She constantly tells me how important our friendship is and how I'm the most important person to her, yet she will ditch me at a moment's notice for Gustav even though she realizes how much it hurts me.

I still can't say exactly why them having sex bothers me so much. It's partially because I feel like I'm being used, but I feel like there's more to it that I can't put my finger on. I know that the fact that it is Gustav that Elise is hooking up with is far more bothersome to me than if it was some other random guy. The last several weeks Elise and I have had a number of intense talks about the status of our relationship, in which I repeated my feelings for her and told her how much it had hurt me that one of the reasons she said she wouldn't go out with me has totally gone out the window, as tons of brothers in my house now know that she is at least kind of back together with Gustav. Right now they are just friends with benefits, but I feel like she is trying to revive a dead relationship because while she still has feelings for him (and apparently they have great sex together), I don't think he cares about more than the sex at this point (he has some commitment issues after a string of crazy ex-girlfriends). I've encouraged her to talk to him about the status of their relationship, but she refuses to confront him about whether or not they are going to get back together because she doesn't want to mess up their current sex-only relationship, and because she is worried that if she pushes him there won't be any chance of them getting back together again in the long run (which I'm not sure would happen anyway). I really want her to talk to him...partially so I know where they're at, and partially because I feel like on some deep level I know if she tries to date him again they may stop hooking up altogether.

So basically, here's what I'm asking:
-Am I right to feel like I'm being used? Or do I just have to accept that she can't control who she has feelings for?
-Is it reasonable for me to be hurt that Elise and Gustav continue to hook up even though Elise and I spend far more time together (often alone) than the two of them?
-Is there anything I can do to change the situation? Ideally to make her realize that she may have feelings for me (because we would really, really work well together. We're practically dating at this point, minus the sex. I've had a number of people who know us both well ask if we're together), but if not that, to make the situation more tolerable for me? Every time I get ditched so they can have sex (in fact, even when I'm not ditched) it's like a needle to the heart. We totally have the rapport, the chemistry, the shared interests, the time spent together of a boyfriend and girlfriend...everything but the physical aspect.

TLDR Version
Best female friend knows I have feelings for her, continues to hook up with an ex boyfriend in what seems like a vain hope that they can get back together again. She knows it hurts me that she ditches me to have sex with him yet she still does it pretty indiscriminately and I don't know if I'm in the right to feel hurt about the situation or if I should accept that she loves who she loves.


Wow, that's really long. If any of you have the attention span to slog through all of that, I would appreciate the help immensely. I don't want to lose my best friend, but I don't know if we can stay friends like we are if she keeps doing this.

[ConfusedAlex]

I laughed out loud at the ridiculous number of parallels between us and our situations. Even your manner of writing, take a look at my post "Confusing and abrupt ending to a promising relationship?", you'll see what I mean. I'm assuming your name is Edward? (Just a guess, its mine as well, Alexander is my middle name).

Most pertinently for you, I've been in a similar situation. The situation was reversed, but the feelings are, I think, the same. About two years ago my best friend and I moved in together. We are actually exes; we had broken off a two year relationship about two years before we moved in together, and have had a very close friendship. When we first moved in, we were both in relationships, and his partner was a close friend of mine.

Move forward about a year, he has broken off that relationship, and we are both single. I had thought I no longer had feelings for him, and that even if I did, I could handle being friends only. But it was very difficult to hear him come home night after night with randoms and have really gratifying and noisy sex. Lying in bed in my room at night, next to his, and hearing him go at it with another person, was particularly painful.

It was difficult particularly because we shared (and still do) a very close bond intellectually. The people he'd bring home were by and large total airheads, but physical attraction was enough for him. It was difficult to see him start a relationship with someone who I knew to be an absolute fraud and liar. But its not something I really had much control over, nor should I have had the inclination to try to prevent it from proceeding.

From me, because we were living together and the nature of our friendship, he got the intellectual, social and to a degree, emotional/romantic qualities that a good relationship should have, and he got what he needed sexually elsewhere. In my experience, having a relationship with a friend that doesn't work out won't ruin a post-relationship friendship. What will ruin any relationship, friendship or romantic, are unreciprocated feelings.

So, by a somewhat circuitous route, I've arrived at your questions. I think you are being used to a degree, that Elise gets from you the stability, the emotional security, and so on, that she should be getting in a relationship, whilst deriving physical satisfaction elsewhere. She knows that she has you as a security net, that she can have sex with these other chaps, and have you as the shoulder to cry on at 3 in the morning (you didn't mention something along those lines, but I'm assuming it's fairly accurate).

Is it reasonable for you to be upset by Elise doing whatever it is she does? Logically, no. She has made it clear you're not in a relationship. But logic and reason, and affairs of the heart, are like oil and water. Its entirely understandable that being ditched at short notice for a hook up, or seeing the aftermath or hearing stories about Elise hooking up with other guys, would be very difficult to stomach, and upsetting when you have these intense and partially unreciprocated feelings for her.

What makes this situation a really difficult one, similar to mine, is the proximity. She is engaging in this sexual activity in close proximity to your personal space, to your social group, to your life. It makes it very hard to shut your eyes to it and is impossible to have a "What I don't know can't hurt me" attitude when you know not just the generalities but the particulars of specific hook ups.

I don't have any clear answers for you unfortunately, except to encourage you to seek out other women if it seems impossible that Elise will try a romantic relationship with you. What is clear is that the status quo, as you described it, is untenable. It might be rather easy and convenient for her, but heartbreaking for you and you really need to find some kind of circuit breaker otherwise it will just be the cause of deep frustration and eventually resentment against her personally. I can assure you, from personal experience, that's not a road you want to go down.

One possible solution is to take a step back, stop seeing Elise so much, allow yourself to develop a bit more detachment than you have now. Seeing each other every day is a lot for best friends. Its a difficult step to take, but it would mean that she cannot rely on a pseudo-romantic relationship with you to fulfill only the emotional needs that she requires, and that is the kind of action that would focus her mind and energy on considering what it is she wants from relationships with boyfriends, best friends and f*** buddies, and reflect on the priorities she assigns to particular people in her life.

[ConfusedAlex]

Oh, I did have a quick question about the situation between you and Elise. Is there the physical chemistry? I guess the question is, is there a significant disparity in looks, body type etc between you? I know it might seem like a fairly vacuous and superficial question, but I've dated a few people where in most ways they were very well suited to me, but it went nowhere because I simply was not physically attracted to them for one reason or another.

Physical attraction certainly isn't the be all and end all of relationships, or even the most important, but it would be foolish to say its unimportant or of little practical significance. Physical attraction is so instinctual that its hard to develop a romantic relationship with someone where it is absent.

[EdSaid]

With regards to the physical nature:

I'm a pretty average looking guy and I'm kind of skinny, as is Gustav. She is definitely better looking than either of us. Considering the physical similarities between Gustav and I, I don't think that's a dominant factor but it's certainly a possibility.


I really appreciate all the advice, Edward. Ed isn't actually my name; I named my screen name after Edward Said, the Palestinian academic, because I liked that when you shorten his first name to Ed his full name appears to rhyme on paper. lol. I've talked to a very close mutual friend about the situation (also a homosexual male) and he gave me very similar advice, namely that to spend less time with her and to keep my options open with regard to other girls. I haven't made myself completely exclusive to Elise or anything, I have still had a couple of hook ups since we became really close friends. But the occasional one night stand isn't enough to sustain me through what has been going on.

Honestly, I haven't really even been "the shoulder to cry on" for her. She rarely comes to me complaining about men in her life or anything, yet she always manages to tell me some kind of story that starts with "I was laying in bed with Gustav..." or something of that nature, even though she knows how much I dislike it. It just seems that I can't escape them; even this morning, I got woken up by a knock on my door which turned out to be Elise inviting me to a free concert after having spent the night in Gustav's room. The proximity of the situation is definitely one of the hardest things about it.

I've also been peeved a lot by the fact that recently she's been using the phrase "I love you" basically as some kind of implicit apology, where if I say something positive back I'm basically being entrapped into tacitly accepting her actions. She only says it before/after she has done something she knows hurts me, so I feel like I can't even respond to her anymore without feeling like I'm rolling over and giving her permission to keep hurting me.

Also, I neglected to mention in my original post that Gustav is, to the best of my knowledge, pretty much in the dark about all this drama going on between Elise and I. As far as I know, he believes we're (Elise & I) just friends and isn't really aware of the fact that I have feelings for her/am hurt by their **** buddy relationship. I haven't really made any attempt whatsoever to talk to him about the situation, partly because I don't feel like he's done anything wrong (I certainly wouldn't pass up the opportunity he has before him if I didn't know it was hurting anyone) and partially because it doesn't seem like discussing relationships is his strong point. I have felt a kind of obligation not to discuss it with him for the same reason Elise hasn't: because I don't want to risk jeopardizing the possibility of them having a real relationship. But really, do I owe that to either of them? Would the situation be made better if I discussed it with Gustav?

[ConfusedAlex]

Edward Said was my second guess, I read Orientalism as an ungrad student, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I won't get off topic, though middle eastern history and politics is an area of great interest for me.

Re: the physical situation, I had guessed as much, but wanted to make sure I was giving appropriate advice. In other words, I wanted to make sure you weren't grotesquely obese, or something like that, in which case my advice might have been somewhat different.

I've also been peeved a lot by the fact that recently she's been using the phrase "I love you" basically as some kind of implicit apology, where if I say something positive back I'm basically being entrapped into tacitly accepting her actions. She only says it before/after she has done something she knows hurts me, so I feel like I can't even respond to her anymore without feeling like I'm rolling over and giving her permission to keep hurting me.

Its quite possible that she does love you, in a fraternal kind of way. I think that people should be very circumspect about using those three words, and qualified where necessary to avoid misunderstandings, say with "like a brother". Here's the difficult bit, I have to criticise Elise, and that's probably as unpalatable to you as hearing about her sexual liaisons with Gustav. Elise knows these anecdotes hurt you, and so she is either proceeding without thinking of the emotional consequences for you and only the gratification that she gets from retelling the stories, or she does so having fully contemplated the effect on you. The former seems like a selfish, if fairly minor, self-indulgence. The latter, seems sadistic and pathological. I encourage you to contemplate, if what I've laid out is a fair analysis, if she is necessarily the right woman for you.

As we've both pointed out, proximity is what makes this particularly difficult. I encourage you to divert and distract yourself with the company of other women; I think you'll almost certainly find that you're not nearly as attached to Elise as you think you are if you start dating another woman. It might have the side-effect of inciting Elise's jealousy, and perhaps forcing her to contemplate what it is exactly that she wants from you.

Re: discussing it with Gustav, in the strongest possible terms, I would advise you not to do that. He's not really done anything wrong, and wouldn't be even if he knew you were being hurt by it, as what he's doing involves two consenting adults, and neither of them are in a committed relationship with another person. By talking to him about it, you insert yourself as the third person into the relationship. I think it would almost certainly cause difficulties between Elise and Gustav, but it would not be morally justifiable, and could come across as a crude attempt to get that outcome, in which case you would alienate not just Gustav, but Elise, and anyone else they discuss it with.

When you have these unreciprocated feelings, the best medicine is distraction, and that is hard if you are seeing Elise so much. Its also the case that few women would want to get involved in this menage a trois, and so you're closing off your options with other women by spending so much time and emotional energy with Elise. I'm sure you can see how well this situation works for Elise, and how detrimental it is to you. Spending less time with her, distracting yourself with other women and pursuits, these are the only things that will remedy the way you're feeling.

My (not particularly considerable) experience tells me Elise won't have an epiphany and suddenly want to start a relationship with you (any time soon, anyway), so take a look at some other options and force yourself not to be so involved with Elise, as difficult as that will be.

[ConfusedAlex]

By the way, I'm assuming you're around 18-20. Don't take it all too seriously. Once I had come out of a committed relationship, I was an absolute rake in college. I was as dissolute as they come, and filled with my nights and days off with wine, woman and song (that is, if you change wine into alcohol and drugs, and change woman into men and women). It was ruinous for my reputation amongst a set of people whose opinions meant little to me, and was outrageously fun. Unless you have some strong moral or religious objections, I encourage you to enjoy the licentious experience that college is supposed to be, because once its finished, you really do have to get serious about careers and relationships.

[EdSaid]

Thanks so much for the advice, Alex. You're absolutely right, I need to devote less of my time and energy to this relationship. I really appreciate the help, I think I can definitely ease the tensions by just taking it easy and going back to what I was doing before we met.