Week 4

Being friends with a guy and only remaining friends with has been rather hard in the past. Not for me thought, for him. In 7^th grade I became friends with this guy Jimmy, him and I have been really good friends since then to this day. Once we got into high school, and hormones started raging in boys, Jimmy started to develop feelings for me. We would hang out by ourselves and talk for hours about life, our families, traumatic experiences, and people of the opposite sex we were attracted to of course. I always assumed that since we were able to have these mature conversations and keep everything between us, that we were strictly platonic friends who just enjoyed each others company and were able to talk about anything. Well, I guess this was a plus for Jimmy, he found this attractive about me and he took these sacred shared moments as a sign that I was into him as well. Which wasn’t the case at all, I had absolutely no sexual attraction or romantic feelings for him. He was simply my best friend who happened to be male. For a couple of years in high school me and Jimmy stopped talking for good. It came to the point where he would constantly bring up the fact of “why don’t you want to be with me, we have such a great time together, we‘re perfect for each other.” For me, there just wasn’t a romantic spark. Yes, we would have been perfect for each other if I was attracted to him in that type of way. I felt awful about the whole thing because 1. I lost one of my best friends, and 2. I hurt his feelings, which was not my intention at all. It took Jimmy a couple of years, up until about Junior year of high school to realize that it was not worth cutting each other out of our lives just because he couldn’t be with me romantically. I was really happy to find us in conversation one day about how he was immature and should have handled it better and that he misses my friendship. This made me feel happy because I knew then that he really respected our friendship, enough to bring it back to life. Ever since then him and I have been better than ever. Always getting together when we were home from college to catch up on our life experiences. I guess it took him losing me as a friend to realize that he’d rather have me be only his friend than to not have me in his life at all. This is kind of sad in a way because at times I feel he still has some type of feelings for me and wishes we had dated in the past, but I am glad to have my friend back. He is one of those friends that I can see being at my wedding years from now and I know I can always count on him for anything. There is always a positive and a negative to every friendship. And I guess me and Jimmy overcame the negative to remain positive for the rest of time.