Impossible love

Hi Merlin,

I am really surprised more people have not posted on this topic you brought up. I have a story for you, and you've commented on my main thread, so I don't need to go over the details of my situation.

One thing I have not yet mentioned in my thread is that last year, two years into my marriage, I fell in love with a guy who says he is straight. This was the kind of love that came out of nowhere seemingly, and that was so unexpectedly potent and so exhilarating that it caught me off guard. Some of my responses to your questions are buried in the story.

In a nutshell, this guy was the boyfriend of my wife's co-worker. I met him at a party for employees at my wife's work, and later, my wife and his girlfriend set up a double date four the four of us. I remembered thinking that he was pretty cute when I first saw him; in fact, I noticed him before I even met him because I overheard him talking with another of my wife's co-workers who is somewhat flamboyantly gay, and I just assumed he was this other guy's boyfriend. (Remember, I have lived a totally secret homosexual life in my head until about 5 weeks ago; my gaydar has grown pretty strong.) Anyway, when we finally started talking, it was one of those magical moments where our conversation just click click clicked. I remember that we were at a very public place with lots of people, but I only remember him because we never stopped talking the whole night. I remember worrying that my wife was probably getting annoyed that I was not talking to her, but I justified it to myself thinking that it is about time that I have a good guy friend (like you, I don't have a ton of good friends either, and I have always had a hard time becoming good friends with guys in particular, for reasons that I imagine [but do not know] are tied to my homosexuality). At the time, he and I were both in between jobs, so we had a lot of time on our hands. I remember, so distinctly, that he invited me to go to an event with him one day while our wives were at work. I just about melted. He wanted to hang out with me more? At this point, I was not in love with him, I was just so excited that I may have found a new best friend (in retrospect, I am now pretty sure that a huge part of my feelings in this respect were due to me involuntarily yearning for an emotional connection with a man, though at the time, I just rationalized it as me wanting a best friend to complement me in my life with my wife). We met up at this event, had another click click clicky time, and made plans for the next outing together. Burned in my mind forever is the wonderful memory of us on the train riding home, him approaching his stop which was before mine, and him reluctantly getting off before me: we were having such a great conversation, he was visibly uncomfortable leaving! After that, I sought out every opportunity I could to see him more, without making it awkward. Then, if you can believe it, he ended up getting a job on the same block as where I was starting work. He was 3 minutes away from me, every day. He tells me, "We should get lunch sometime." I am fricken beaming! "Yeah, sounds great," I say. The first time I met him for lunch, I saw him standing outside my office building waiting for me to come out, all dressed up in his work clothes. I see him, he smiles at me.... that was when I lost it. Suddenly I realized how beautiful he was. My god, his face! I could hardly look at him. I had to snap out of it and control myself; if I didn't he would be weirded out and run for the hills. So, like I have done so many times before with other guys, I snapped back into "straight me" and went to lunch. Click click click; it all was just so amazing. After several lunches, I said to him: "Anytime you want to go to lunch, let me know. I would go to lunch with you every day if you wanted." I think I may have crossed a weird boundary with that, but to my most pleasant surprise, he ended up responding: "Yeah, it is nice to have a break in the day, I will let you know." For the next year, we would go to lunch 2, 3, 4, or 5 times a week. One of my very favorite parts of this story: Sometimes, my friend would have already eaten lunch or couldn't make the usual luinch time, but instead of cancelling our meeting, he would invite me to go for coffee later in the day. We would sit in a coffee shop, sometimes for over an hour, just talking. I would consciously avoid my assignments at work, or find a way to get around them, just so I could make time to see my friend. Meeting with him was the very best part of my day, just about every day.

After our first lunch, we started g-chatting. All the time. When he would start chatting me out of the blue, I would sometimes get so excited, I would get an erection. That is unusual, I remember thinking to myself. Over time, I started testing the boundaries of the potential weirdness that I mentioned above. I would cross certain lines just to see how far I could get. For example, I would steer the conversation to more personal topics, like old girlfriends, feeling about strip clubs, attitudes about gay people. I was testing him to see if he might be gay too. The results of many of these tests of mine provided me evidence that he might indeed be gay, but some tests indicated a possibility of straight: those always made me so mad. For example, he never talked about his old girlfriends unless I brought it up, and when he did say something, he said it quickly and changed then subject. = GAY. He hates stripclubs because he thinks they are dirty. =GAY. One time, though (but only once), did he comment on how attractive he thought Jennifer Lawrence is. I remember being so pissed off that he said that, and I think he noticed. mostly, though, we just talked about less personal stuff. T.V., politics, jobs, etc. We spent a lot of time talking out our own jobs. I was the guy who he vented all of his frustrations about work to, and I fricken loved it. I could just sit there and listen to him talk forever. Sometimes I would lose track of what he was saying because I would get lost staring at him: his eyes, his freckles, his crooked teeth. I would snap myself out of it and refocus. Unfortunately, our lunch breaks and g-chats could only last so long; after all, if we didn't actually do our jobs we would have nothing to bitch to each other about the next day.

I would go home and tell my wife how excited I was to have a new best friend, that we would have lunch almost every day. She was happy for me. I thought I had finally found the balance I was looking for: a great wife and a great best friend. I was seriously in denial about what the friendship really meant to me.

One day, he told me that his wife was going to be away Thurs-Sun., he knew that my wife was away too, and he said that he thought we should hang out. He told me I could come over to his place and we could watch movies. I almost fainted. "Sounds cool," I said. I remember thinking to myself, "Is this it? Is he finally going to make a move on me?" I was married and had never cheated on my wife; but in this instance, I told myself that if he made a move, I would go for it. I remember picking out my outfit for that day thinking about how I could manage a possible overnight (on Thurs.) and still get to work the next day in work condition. I got to his apartment and was so nervous. I was looking for a move, any move would do, ANYTHING! The result: nothing. He sat on the couch, I sat on the couch, then he moved down to the floor. I remember on the couch looking down at him as the movie was playing. 5-10 minutes of the movie would pass with me just looking down at him, stretched out on the floor. I had it bad, and apparently, my feelings were totally unreciprocated. Frack.

After a few months of the friendship, he had some news for me. He had proposed to his girlfriend. "I am so happy for you," I said with very mixed emotions. I was so fricken jealous of his fiancée, I could hardly stand it. Then they started planning the wedding. I gave him whatever advice I could think of. I told him that I was there to help him with anything he needed; he could trust me to be a good friend, a best friend (even though I had only known him for a few months, I had already decided he was my best friend, though I am pretty sure he did not even think of me as his best friend). I could go on and on about this, but I will just say that he got married, and now we were two married friends having lunch together almost every day.

Six months or so into our friendship, I started to test boundaries more and more. I would start to let loose hints of some the emotions I was feeling toward him. When he turned me down for a lunch meeting or some other thing, I would react with frustration or anger--totally inappropriate for the straight "buddy" friendship we had built together. He did not respond well. When I felt like he was distant at lunch or wherever, I would ask him if something was wrong. He would say nothing was wrong. I wanted so bad for him to open up to me, to tell me about his feelings--not just feelings about me, feelings in general. I wanted that emotional connection so bad. He never gave it to me.

We were good friends for almost a year. I was in love, he wasn't, or if he was at one point, it faded or he shut it down. But he stayed friends with me nonetheless. I think he liked having somebody to bitch about work to. Anyway, one day, he told me he couldn't have lunch that day, so we should meet for coffee in the morning (this was unusual). I met up with him and we started talking about the usual stuff. After about 20 minutes, he gets a nervous look on his face and tells me that he got a new job. I remember saying sincerely, "That's wonderful, congratulations, it's about time you get out of that place you hate." He tells me that I did not understand; he got a new job in a new state-he was moving away in 2 months. I felt like he had just stabbed me in the gut. I almost started crying right in front of him. I told him I had to go and I went to my office, closed the door, and sulked. The next day, I asked if he wanted to go to lunch. I had prepared a speech for him. I waited until the end of lunch, and then I launched into it. I told him that he was my best friend, that I was basically devastated that he was leaving, that I couldn't believe all our plans for fun things we would do together were not going to happen. He told me: "I feel similarly." I wanted to puke at that. F'ing "similarly"?! When we broke off after lunch that day when we reached my office building, I hugged him. My embrace was so very loaded, but his was practically empty.

He moved away. He would come back to town periodically, and I told him him and his wife could stay with my wife and I anytime they wanted. One time, he told me they were coming to town for a wedding. I was so excited I would get to see him again! But then he told me that his wife was coming earlier than him, so he asked if she could stay with us, but not him. "Of course!" I said as I gritted my teeth. Then, at the wedding, I was practically giddy when I saw him, but he acted as though I was just some friend you politely make conversation with and then move on to somebody else. I was crushed. I decided not to be his friend anymore, but after a couple weeks, I gave in and started g-chatting him again. I told myself: even an abusive friendship with him is better than no friendship at all.

Then, five weeks ago, the disclosure to my wife. The night I told her I am gay, I told her I had been in love with this friend. It was an "emotional affair," she helped me realize. now that I have really considered what happened, I am ashamed that I let that happen while I was married to my wife. She did nothing to deserve me cheating on her in that way. I have now decided that I cannot be friends with this guy, even long-distance, so long as I am married to my wife. It doesn't really matter, anyway, he never reciprocated my feelings for him and I think he was turned off from being my friend as I started to try to force an emotional connection.

By the way, I want so much to believe that my friend is gay and living the same kind of heterosexual life I was living until the disclosure. I want to believe that he loved me back at some point. But there is a very real possibility that the whole thing was in my head; that he is totally straight, and that I was kidding myself the whole time.

So Merlin, if your situation is like mine, your story might not end so great. But who knows, maybe your guy is different.

 

Hi, Merlin

I have experienced relatively the same, once me falling for my best friend, a couple years later it was another friend who fell for me. Both times it ended pretty badly. The friend I fell for was a straight girl with a knack for picking the wrong guy. I was an emotional support, we wrote stories together, all in all, I felt like she was my soul-mate in every way. However, she was straight, didn`t feel the same, and even though I felt content with just at least keeping the friendship, my subtle "worship" of her didn`t go unnoticed (or so I suspect), and she pulled back. She began doing this odd game of suddenly being friends, then just as suddenly pulling back. In the end, I had to just focus on my emotional well-being, and cut off all contact with her. I was incapable of eradicating how I felt about her, and with her cat/mouse game it just got too painful.

The other incident was one of my friends falling for me. I guess I should have seen it coming, we had been kissing and flirting for fun when drinking alcohol, but this was very common among female friends in most circles for a period, and I wasn`t completely out to myself yet. That is, I knew, but I hadn`t really embraced it. This was a nice girl, but our temperaments were a total mismatch. We bare managed keeping our friendship healthy, there was no way we`d manage a relationship. She was too emotionally unstable, and I too emotionally fragile. So, I avoided "understanding" her hints, to the point where she told me straight up when we both had been drinking. (Never a good idea to do this when the other person has consumed a lot of alcohol).

In any case, I told her I didn`t think we could work, she got so angry, and the friendship went straight to hell.

So, no, I don`t have any positive experiences with falling for friends, and it has resulted in me developing pretty firm mental boxes in which I place people, either love-interest or friend. If the`y`re friend-zoned, they stay friend-zoned. People in the friend box are like siblings, in that I just don`t notice them sexually or romantically. It took some time to fuse myself this way, but it`s worked pretty well as a defense. When I met my GF, it was actually to meet new people, and make friends, but I saw pretty quickly that I was going to have problems friend-zoning her, so if we hadn`t gotten together, I probably wouldn`t have pursued a friendship with her.

I wish I could be more positive about it... Who knows, you might be lucky, but the risk of getting hurt for a good while as well as losing the friendship is there.