This Is What It’s Like To Be Secretly In Love With Your Best Friend

One day you’re going to wake up, go out with your best friend, and you look at her and feel like something is different. You’ll silently ask yourself did she cut her hair? Is she wearing a new t-shirt? Did she get a tan?

It’ll go on for a while until it sinks in that nothing has changed, except for the way you look at her.

You’ll start paying more attention to the stories she tell. You’ll look more deeply in her eyes when she’s trying to explain how her day went. You’ll catch yourself staring at her lips in the middle of her sentences.

However, you’ll try not to mind it and just go on with your day. After some time, the realization will catch up to you and you’ll feel like it’s not possible. You’ll reject it. You’ll try not to entertain the thought again. This becomes harder whenever you have to talk to her and be with her almost every single time, because your brain will go on and on asking you if you really do have feelings for her. You’ll want to shut your brain down.

You won’t believe how you’re suddenly nervous around her or how your heart beats twice as fast when she leans on you.

Normal things that you do with her won’t seem that normal to you at all, anymore. You’ll try and go date other people just to try and see if maybe you can connect with them in that same way, but it’ll fail because by the end of the day, she’s the one you want to come home to. One day, in a conversation with yourself, it’ll slip. You’ll tell yourself that you love her. Love in the most romantic level and not just the ordinary I-love-you as a friend. You’ll start accepting the fact that yes, you are falling for your best friend.

You’ll try and feel passive about it because you have to act cool and make it look like nothing changed dramatically because you don’t know if she feels that way too.

By then you’ll start researching whether it’s normal to be in love with that one person who knows you well the most. You’ll search if it’s too complicated and you’ll learn that there are a lot of great relationships to this day which started from being best friends. Being the person who knows her well enough, and the person she goes to when she has a problem suddenly becomes an advantage to you.

You’ll realize that you’re the “perfect one” for her. You know her dating standards. You know what she likes and what she hates. You know what will make her day, and how to cheer her up. You’re in sync. You can tell when she’s not okay but is trying to. You know when she needs space, and how to still be in arms-length any way. You know her family and they love you. After this, you’ll try and analyze her.

Does she like you in the same way? What’s the possibility that she does?

She’s not seeing anyone right now, right? You’ll go on and on re-thinking conversations in your head, looking for at least one moment where she may have told you indirectly how she feels. You’ll lose sleep over replaying moments with her trying to look for signs. You’ll just want to confront her, and ask her but you know you can’t because you’re still afraid. If and when you’re strong enough, you’ll dare to ask her if she’ll ever date you and quickly make an excuse about why you’re asking that to her. You’ll hold your breath, waiting for her answer and it’ll feel like a minute can’t be that long. If she replied positively, you’re going to want to take your chance and admit to her, at that exact moment, that you like her, but you know she deserves better.

She deserves to be told personally that you have feelings for her, not through a Twitter DM. So you plan in your head how you’ll tell her. Maybe up in a rooftop while silently watching the busy streets of the city, or perhaps while watching the sun rise while everybody is quietly sleeping. You know for a fact that she, more than anyone else, deserves that moment.

There’s only one last dilemma. To tell her completely how you feel about her, or to just try and move on, and act like nothing happened.

If you tell her, there’s a rather huge possibility that it will be awkward for her and that she’ll start moving away from you or worse, cut you out of her life. On the other hand, if you take your chances and tell her, there’s a huge possibility that she strongly feels the same way and that she was just waiting for you to tell her first. Then again, this is overthinking working here. I, myself would like to tell you. Get out there and tell her how much she means to you. Life is so short for you to let this one pass.

For all you know, she’s the one. So what if she doesn’t feel the same way? If you’re really good friends, you can always go back to the way you were. Just remember that she deserves to know how you feel about her too. In the words of my best friend, who I love more than anyone in this world, “it’s better to say it rather than to regret it when you see that person with someone else who doesn’t deserve her.” So go, and take your chances, my friend.