Is she gay?

So there's this girl I've known for over a year now. She lives in Europe, I'm in America, she's fluent in English. Back at the start she admitted she was at least bicurious, and then after a bit of flirting we started an LDR. A month passed, parents found out and freaked, we agreed to stop talking out of fear for her safety. Couple months later I snapped and contacted her again, because she's basically my best and only friend and it hurt so much without her. I told her I still had feelings for her, she said she didn't, but ever since then we've talked every day, and I can't shake the feeling that she's been flirting with me. As soon as we started talking again, she kept teasing me about how I was still flirting with her, and pressing me to say that my feelings for her really were full-on romantic, not just strong friendship, and at some point she sent these photos in a bath towel teasing me about how flustered I was getting and how it turned me on. While I was gone she told her sister she was gay, then when we started talking again she told another friend she was bisexual (thinking that her friend would take it better if she said bi and not gay), then got a boyfriend in October. November she started telling me 'I love you' (this from the girl who is singularly unsentimental, except when she has reason to be), joked around in suggestive ways, she came to me for comfort (and only me, she noted) when in distress, started calling me a lot, had a dream about me, said how she loved and missed my voice and just hearing it calmed her down, pretended to be asleep while traveling with her boyfriend so he'd leave and she could call me instead. She told me, point blank, that she liked me better than my boyfriend. Then at New Year's that all stopped, and when I asked her why she just said sometimes she was especially hype, and when she'd said she loved me she meant she appreciated me. That drove us apart for a bit, considering I was still deeply in love with her, but then I confronted her and asked if she could tell me she had zero feelings for me if that was the case, and stop stringing me along, and if she didn't know then that was okay too, so she said she didn't know. Cue another round of sexual jokes (e.g. how long does it take you to be willing to have sex in a relationship?) and some cuddliness (she told me I was a wonderful friend, which was both awesome and painful, and pretended to propose to me and joked about how I was her wifey). And now she's on her second boyfriend, since about three or four weeks ago, and ever since I broke down and admitted to her that, yeah, I'm still kind of jealous (she could tell something was up with me, and kept asking) we've been suddenly quite distant. She's ignoring my messages and everything, making excuses about being busy, even though she's clearly still talking to other people. I tried to make things normal again by asking how stuff was going with her boyfriend, but she told me not to hurt myself by asking stuff that I wouldn't want to hear about. I managed to talk to her today and she said that she was sorry but she doesn't know what to do, how to act. She didn't elaborate further, but I'm quite certain it's something to do with my crush on her, and her being in a relationship.

She's always been very open with me about how much she likes girls, how she has all these female celeb crushes and no guy crushes and she only ever reads girl/girl romances and watches shows with girl/girl ships, and in our roleplay group she seems to have a lot of fun doing girl/girl stuff, very steamy stuff, mixed with typical romance stuff (she was doing all of that in a roleplay with me before she got distant). She's also very open about the fact that she's never fallen in love with a guy before. But she's also never fallen for a girl before, not seriously, and she seems to really, really like this guy (he's sweet, she spends one or two hours on the phone with him at night frequently, etc.) and I guess on some level I'm just afraid that beyond simply not returning my feelings, she'll forget me completely for this guy, even though she seemed really lost and apologetic when she spoke to me today.

Anyway, long story short, here's my hunch: She's closeted non-straight. Maybe bi, maybe gay. She didn't want to talk to me at least in part because I reminded her uncomfortably of the whole sexuality thing, and she's probably going through this whole weird emotional seesaw thing with me because I'm there, and I'm gay, and I'm far away from her so she can safely experiment with her orientation on me, whether or not there's actually any feelings involved on her part. The question is, how gay is she, and what does she feel about me?

Seriously, this girl is my life, and there's pretty much nothing I wouldn't do for her. (Including, it seems, ignoring a direct order from my father, hiding my sexuality, and risking disownment and worse.) I love her and if I can't have her, I want nothing more than to be her friend and to see her truly happy. She's brave, but she's a little lonely, and my heart breaks a little every time I see her confused or upset or hurt or lost. I want to know what's going on with her so I can understand and help, as much as possible. Last time I tried talking to her about this, I tried gently teasing her about her gayer tendencies (which she herself has joked about in the past, most notably in those weeks with her previous boyfriend where she said she liked me better) and she reacted by closing in on herself for the weekend and not really talking to me. She told me, afterwards, that I'd pissed her off by making assumptions about things that she didn't even know herself. So clearly, it's a touchy subject. I don't want to make another mistake like that again and hurt her without even realizing it.

 

Hello, it's me, I was hoping I could get some help with these perplexities? (/killed by Adele for butchering her song)

 

We are, yeah, sixteen and eighteen. Yeah, I'm totally fine with just being her friend. She's super fun just to talk with and we find kindred spirits in being extra sarcastic with each other, so. As for now, I'm just trying to be as supportive of her and her boyfriend (who seems to be very nice and kind to her) as possible. She seems to be really into him anyway, not like there's much else I could do there anyway. ^^;;

 

I don't want to ask her...I mean, I do, but it never ends well and I know it can't be easy for her, so I don't want to bug her with it again. It would just make her unhappy, and I don't want to do that... If she is gay, I'd rather she tell me when she's comfortable, instead of forcing it from her.

She's talking to me again and things seem more or less normal, but there's a few oddities here and there - last week I asked how her and her boyfriend were doing and she snapped at me to stop acting like I cared about him, so when I got annoyed and said I was just trying to be polite, she gave me this thumbs up and that was it, no questions asked. So I asked why she had been so distant, and she just said she had been busy, nothing more (this despite that she'd had an entire day on which she went on a date with her boyfriend and never wrote me anything that day, or when she sometimes read what I said but didn't respond, or wrote others but ignored me). And now she seems super into her boyfriend, calling him nicknames, choosing baby names with him (the same ones she'd discussed with me), talking about how much she sees him... I asked if she loved him, and she said she didn't know, but that she was spending her break with him. My sister texted my crush asking her if she could talk to her and my crush immediately said she knew what she was going to talk about before my sister even explained, but my sister never found out what it was she thought they were going to talk about... None of it really makes sense anyhow. It seems now, the way she's acting, like she really didn't have any feelings for me, but I still remember everything that happened, and none of it makes sense all put together...

 

Thank you so much for all the kind advice and support!

Right now, it's been three months she's had her current boyfriend, and she says she likes him very very much (and acts so too), but she still hasn't said she is in love or that she loves him (either to me or to him), despite that he's said it to her (and is obviously quite taken by her). On top of that, she still doesn't have a concrete answer for whether she's gay or not. And she always gets a little weird when I talk about finding a girlfriend (making it clear that I mean some actually available, serious girlfriend, not her). There was this time last week when I asked her if I was cute enough for a girlfriend (despite that I was annoying and antisocial?), and she answered with an immediate yes, and then that the shyness made me cute, even though she didn't dispute that I was annoying.

Long story short, I'm still being careful not to flirt with her or anything, particularly as she's doing so well with her boyfriend. Honestly, I've come to the conclusion that it might be for the best if she just stuck with him and married while I was in college, if she really loves the fellow: I got to meet him last month (kinda) and he seems smart, funny, sweet, kind, utterly devoted to her...really the whole package. I think they could really do well together if everything goes right for them. And I wouldn't be bitter then, knowing there's no more questions to be answered, just her being happy with him. Most of the time, I'm really okay with it. But sometimes I get to questioning myself and everything she says, and then the jealousy kinda creeps back in, especially on bad days, like when my parents are fighting...

(This post is becoming sort of a diary style thing now. That's okay, right? ^^;; )

 

I agree that she's not likely to answer me anything about that...she hadn't been before, and I don't want to push the point anyway. It is her choice in the end, after all, so it'd be wrong to try and push her on it, especially since she'd probably assume I'm biased anyway. ^^;

I would date other girls, but then again I don't really want to date anyone at this point seeing how it'd most likely get some poor girl in trouble with my father. Oh well, I'll just have to wait till college at least, I guess...let's just hope nobody thinks I'm lesbian until graduation.

It's a bit frustrating because these days, her boyfriend actually talks to me more than she does, and he's admitted the same is true of me (I talk to him more than she). I feel like she's really closed off lately - I keep trying to talk to her about it but she just listens quietly and never says anything, except to try and change the subject - and it's getting harder because my parents are CONSTANTLY fighting, and she's the only thing that keeps me grounded times like that, but now she won't even talk to me when they're fighting anymore, and she won't talk to me about the fact that she won't talk to me, either. I really want to just live my life, but I can't deny that she's important to me, as a person, and I feel it when stuff like this happens between us.

She did this weird thing last week where she and her boyfriend were joking about having a threesome with me (her boyfriend started it, don't ask) and she was really pushing the point and kept it going for a few days, saying how we (me and her) were screwing each other and stuff and letting her boyfriend see everything she wrote, even after the joke was pretty dead. And then when I finally admitted to her boyfriend that I was gay, she had this whole field day with making really big hints about it and teasing her boyfriend about how oblivious he was acting. And she still won't show him any affection, and he keeps complaining about it to me... I really want to be there for her, but it's frustrating that she's not confronting all of this and doing anything about it, even though I know it's scary. And her boyfriend doesn't deserve this either. I want to do whatever I can to help, but somehow I can't help but think this won't end well.