Throwaway obviously. Long post, sorry. I need to get this out.
I'm 25, finishing my masters. I've been friends with this girl; let's call her D, since first sem. She's genuinely one of the most intellectually alive people I've ever met. We bonded immediately, I thought like magnets. I thought we just understood each other the way you rarely understand people. She had other friends, I had other friends, we weren't even part of the same circle, but still close. I was so proud of her, her achievements, her kindness. Naturally, I felt protective of her. I didn't examine it more than that.
I was in the room when she met her boyfriend. I didn't like the look on his face that day, that's what I told her. But honestly? Looking back, I don't know how much of that was actually about him and how much was something I didn't have a name for yet. I know realize that she looked at him, in a way she would never look at me. She later told me her type, and her bf fits. He's tall, handsome, successful and fair.
She started dating him. Long distance. He was away for months. I was away for months. Her closest friends knew. I didn't. She's a private person, she doesn't perform her relationship for people and I respected that. I didn't even clock what was building in me because there was nothing to clock it against. She wasn't hiding him. I just... wasn't who she told first. That's fair. That's how it should be. He's her boyfriend. That's what I told myself, I am no one in the picture.
He seems like a decent person, actually. He even tried to help me professionally, gave me a contact at an institution I've been trying to break into. I kind of felt awful taking that contact at all and just smiled through the convo. I don't know how to sit with that.
She found out later, not from me, through someone else who overheard something I said, that I have feelings for her. I said something out loud that I didn't mean to say. Something about why would she like me anyway, I don't compare. I know how that sounds. It wasn't meant to be heard, and I didn't mean to make her hear it. It just came out of a place I didn't know existed until recently and I'm mortified.
Her friend cussed me out for it. And she had every right to. The thing is, in my campus and in North Indian context, I am a short, dark complexioned guy with no such paying job. Obviously I think D's friend is right, that I was batting for someone way out of my league, and I hadn't seen my face in the mirror, while liking her.
I'm not saying I believe, I'm not attractive enough. That's not, I mean, it is partly that. But it's more than that. It's everything. It's the career stuff, the height stuff, the feeling of being the friend who's always around but never liked that way or picked to be a partner, I don't know. I know that's not how A thinks. I know she doesn't pick people that way. She's told me as much with how she treats everyone around her. But the spiral doesn't care about what I know.
I'm not doing well right now. I know this is entirely something I have to deal with internally. She didn't do anything wrong. She has never, not once, acted like anything other than a genuinely caring friend. I think I confused what good male-female friendship feels like, I've had so many female friends, I thought this was just that. Maybe I've had so few people romantically that I don't know the difference.
I'm not telling her face to face. I'm not trying to do anything. I just feel awful and I can't tell anyone in my real life because they're all in the same friend group and the last thing she needs, right after her career success, right when everyone's celebrating her, is this weight.
I just needed to say it somewhere.