I moved to the US from Germany four years ago for work. I have maybe three real friends here. One of them is a girl I've known almost since I landed, meet on the plane. Never romantic, just one of those friendships where you end up at each other's birthdays. Eight months ago she called me at 1am crying. She'd been kicked out, three months behind on rent, sitting on the sidewalk drunk with a duffel bag. I drove over and got her. Of course I did. Told her she could stay a few days while she figured something out. I genuinely meant a few days. The first weeks were fine she was grateful, she cooked, she cleaned, she kept apologizing for being there. Somewhere in there it stopped being a friend on my couch and started being something else. We never talked about what we were. I think we both knew if we put a word on it, the whole thing would collapse.
Now it's eight months later and I don't know what my life is anymore. We work opposite shifts so I see her for an hour in the morning when I'm coming home and she's leaving. The apartment is constantly destroyed. Plates everywhere, her clothes on every chair. I clean it, she thanks me, two days later it's the same.
I've tried to bring up her finding her own place maybe four times. Every time she either gets emotional and I back off, or the conversation just dissolves and the words never get said. I've told myself I'm being patient. I think I've been being a coward, then there's the financial side where i'm covering everything. I dont know how but i managed to save some money this last month from a work bonus! Here's the part I haven't said out loud until I started typing this, I told myself this whole thing was casual because casual is what she needed and I was just being a good friend. The truth is I was lonely. Germany feels like another planet some days. My family is 4,000 miles away. When she landed in my apartment I think part of me was relieved the silence had something in it again, even if it came with all this mess.
I don't want to kick her out, I just want her to leave on her own, I want to feel okay about it and I want us to still be friends after. I'm starting to realize you don't get to want all three of those things at once.
So AITAH for wanting her out, even though I never set a deadline, never charged her rent, and we've been sleeping together this whole time?