How do you go from being best friends to being a couple? The grey area you find yourself post-confession is a mixture of anxiety and excitement. There’s no clear or easy way to handle a transition from being friends to lovers. Hopefully, a little insight into my experience will serve as a guide.
It’s safe to say everyone else saw it coming, besides the actual two people involved, my best friend and I. He and I didn’t know each other for too long, just over a year, and we met in college. It started as a one-sided crush on my part that quickly dissolved and became a friendly bond amongst two extreme introverts. Over the span of the year and a half of knowing him, I’d always find myself at his side sharing whatever problem I had that day. We saw each other through hookups, relationships and breakups. On two occasions I met two separate girls he had hooked up with, and yet I swallowed the feelings I had for him and coyly denied liking him more than a friend. That’s how it continued for a while; we even took a trip to California together where I met some of his family. That’s how I expected things to remain, especially since he graduated a semester before me. I thought that was it, we really are just friends and a part of me had accepted that wholeheartedly.
So I didn’t expect the confession over Snapchat the day after my birthday, while he was boarding his flight to Amsterdam. With that one confession came a string of confessions about how we both harbored feelings for one another and neither of us could tell the other. Basically a mess of hits and misses. But now here we find ourselves acknowledging that, yes, we have those romantic cringey feelings for one another but for some reason nothing has changed. We’re dating now, and nothing has changed and it’s as if we were dating all along. The complicated part now is that he’s relocated to San Diego from Albany after having graduated but I have one final semester at college. Nothing has changed because we’ve seen each other through our worst times in college, and we still accept that part of one another.
So we work. We’re making it work.