I recently came out to two of my best friends. It felt great because it was also sort of an acceptance to myself that I am gay. Since then I've also told a couple of other people. One of those two friends is my roommate. He's a very understanding guy and is gay himself. One day I decided that I needed to put it on the table and let him know that I was attracted to him. In spite of being gay he wasn't attracted to me. But he still sympathized with how I feel because he had had a similar crush on our mutual friend, the other guy I had initially come out to. So this attraction sort of developed into a codependence where I attempted to spend every possible moment with him always. It resulted in some drama that always left me feeling like an asshole. I would do things like ask him where he was going after work under the guise of the caring roommate and it drives me crazy that he thinks I'm a bad driver so I constantly try and ask him if my driving on this trip was good. I need to drop it. I need to be thankful he's still my friend. I need to spend less time caring about him. But how exactly do I do that? How does one suspend their feelings for someone?
Well, there's no miracle way to immediately get over feelings. Any method to do that also involves "it takes time". So don't take anything I say as a way of suddenly waking up one day feeling neutral about the guy. But: I think there's basically two ways of distancing yourself slightly (not necessarily mutually exclusive, even). 1) Find something to do, away from him, that you can commit to. I'm thinking of things like volunteering, a group sports, a hobby you can't just ditch whenever convenient. Or even a small job. Essentially anything that you'll be busy with for at least few hours a week, in which you interact with other people, and that you really have to keep up for some time. Main benefits are that you'll meet a lot of other people (not necessarily as new crushes, but meeting more people is, IMO, one of the better ways to fix an obsession with one person). Also, that if you can be out of the closet during such activities, you might even end up meeting other gay guys who would return any feelings (please not that this should never be the main reason of meeting lots of people. It is, however, a potential side effect). And finally, any hour you're busy is one you're not obsessing about him. 2) If he was very gentle and sympathetic in turning you down, you could also just tell him that you feel your crush on him is not really diminishing much, and that you'd like him to occasionally refuse your offers of hanging out. Obviously, that's a somewhat delicate matter, and you might want to try and find a neutral and non-emotional way to tell him, but since he was in the same situation as you (just with a different guy), he might actually be your best ally, and see how this is both improving the friendship and reducing the crush. Last but not least, try to recognise when you're entertaining fantasies involving him. I did that extensively with my first crush, and that's what kept it alive for far longer than it should. One of the things that helped in reducing that crush was noticing that I was often thinking how my life with him would have been, and actively trying to go for a more generic fantasy. If he was black-haired, brown-eyed and kind of athletic, my new fantasy crush was blonde, blue-eyed and kind of a nerd. Same pleasantness in the fantasy, but none of the fixation on a person that didn't return my feelings. That's all I have for now, but I'm hoping others may weigh in with options that worked for them.
Thanks for the reply, man. I started in Al Anon around the same time I noticed these behavior problems starting. My dad's an alcoholic which affected me growing up, and which this guy demonstrated to me that was still affecting me now, but Al Anon is sort of a generic helping program; it's designed for families and friends of alcoholics but can be applied to many other life issues, and I've applied it most heavily to accepting and embracing my sexuality and dealing with the codependence I've developed. Where I was going with that story was I've begun working these 12 steps and one thing I've realized is that doing the steps is not a matter of checking them off a list and things will magically get better. I definitely understand that. And to the second point, it's funny you should mention that because all three of us know that would probably be a healthy thing. But on several occasions my dramatic outbursts have resulted from a feeling of being excluded because the two of them do something that I would enjoy being a part of but am not invited to participate in. I'm somehow too insecure about myself--and perhaps too boring--to spend some time alone knowing that they're having fun without me.
