It’s one thing to fall in love with your best friend – but it’s something 
completely different to fall in love with someone who is your best friend, when he doesn’t consider you his best friend.
I admit, there is a fine line and almost tragic inability to make that distinction.
How can one know who considers you their best friend? And, even more importantly, shouldn’t I have learned by now that either way – this is a bad idea?
My ideal romance would be with a friend I have a very strong bond with. If anything love would be that much better and during the hard parts of the relationship you always have the friendship to fall back on. With that in mind, I embarked on a often traveled path to the end of nowhere. I met a guy through my close friends, before I knew it we were always together – movies, plays, picnics. In my eyes, those were “us” times; I forgot that almost each one of those times, at least one of our other friends was with us. Through the rose tinted glasses of my memory, those times together were times where we felt a connection.
He walked me to my car, even when it was just blocks away. He always knew the right thing to say. And at 3:00 am after I got home from hanging out, he was online and we would chat.
If it was a girlfriend of mine, I would never have thought twice about all of these things. But simply because it was a guy friend of mine, I took everything that he did and said as more than the words of a friend: I read into it all.
Within seven months of knowing him, I had already gushed about him to my friends and family. Everyone thought I was crazy for not seeing the “signs” that we were meant to be together. But I never spoke to the mutual friends we had, just my own friends. The ones who knew only my side, and had never known anything. I took their advice and prepped my speech.
And that night I stopped by his apartment, prepped with home baked cookies of his favorite kind. There was no cliche moment of a girl opening the door. In fact, his roommate opened the door. He told me to come on in and wait, my friend/crush would be home any moment. I didn’t ask where he was. I just sat down, got comfortable, and starting chatting up his roommate…. and that’s when I heard this: ”I always tease him about you, but he said you both know that it’s nothing more than a friendship.”
The right thing to say is that my world wasn’t crushed, that I held my own and laughed through the conversation. Because big girls have learned by now that when your crush isn’t reciprocated, you don’t let it show. But to me, it wasn’t a crush, it was real. It wasn’t some guy I barely knew – it was someone I knew in and out. Or so I thought. And as those thoughts rushed through my head, the appeared on my face. His roommate stopped in mid conversation and stared at me. And my best friend/ruined crush walked in at that same time.
To this day his roommate and I haven’t discussed that night or that conversation. It’s been over a year. For a while, when I saw my best friend with his new girlfriend, I felt that same searing pain from that particular night. And I wondered, how will I get over this?
And one day, I sat down and figured a few things out, and realized that what I thought was love, was in many ways, desire for love. I saw in him all the things I thought I wanted, not sure if those were things I needed in a man. He was cool, collected and yet rambunctious.
He was Zack Morris in the very essence. But it took me almost two years to figure out that Zack Morris is great on screen – and in real life, I needed more of a character out of Nicholas Sparks book. And lo and behold, I’ve found one.
— Shabana Metha, NEEM Magazine Contributing Writer
