My (20F) friend(21M) confessed over a month ago and things aren't getting better. How do I deal with him?
To preface things, I don't know if I would consider us to be actual friends, but I'm not sure what other term to use at the moment. We are also in a band together and have the same friends so I cannot completely avoid him.
About a month ago, Noah confessed his feelings to me. Things between us and between him and the whole friend group got really weird really fast. I had picked up on the fact that he liked me for a while before then, but I didn't encourage it and hoped the feelings would just go away or that he wouldn't do this.
After the confession, I said I didn't want to talk to him for a while. Our mutual friend, Liv, acted as a mediator and was in contact with him for me for which I am extremely grateful. While she was talking to him about how I didn't want to talk to him, and that I was uncomfortable, he just kept insisting that he needed to see me and talk to me about it. That the only way it would get better is if he talked to me about it alone. He emphasized alone multiple times.
Obviously I didn't want to be alone with him, especially not to talk about this topic. Eventually I broke down and decided I would let him say whatever he thought he needed to say. Again, Liv acted as a mediator and let me come over to her apartment to talk to him. The talk went just about as well as you are probably imagining. He rambled for almost 40 minutes about how he "only ever saw me as a friend" and that he "didn't ever do anything to me except be a friend". To be honest, I just sat there staring at the floor trying not to cry and didn't say much. I did tell him though that normally I stop talking to guys who confess to me when the feeling isn't mutual. In the moment I felt bad and was overwhelmed so I told him I would try and keep being friends, however I don't think thats true now and it may not have even been true then.
Things have continued to be awkward and weird and lately he's been trying to talk to me more when we hang out with friends and I reply out of courtesy but I honestly can't even handle being around him. He knows this and continues to push to talk to me anyways. I don't know what to do.