Attracted to Best Friend, What should i do? Should i do something?

[confused6759]

Hi, i'm a 24 year old male and I am sexually attracted to my best friend who is female. I know she doesn't feel the same way about me (trust me) but I have had these feelings for close to a 1 year, and have just been trying to push them down and get over it. It doesn't seem to be working and i think my jealousy lets me know that. Whenever we go out to a bar for example and she catches some guys eye and gets excited and wants to go talk to him etc I get very jealous and I just can't help it. I also get jealous when she does stuff with her other male friends that she doesn't do with me. For example with 2 of her other male friends she likes to cuddle, nothing sexual just cuddling, but she would never do that with me and I can't bring it up without sounding weird. Am I supposed to just put up with these feelings and try to be better at dealing with them or what? God damn I sound so insecure and pathetic. We are best friends and I don't want to ruin our friendship. I've even genuinely helped with her guy problems and relationship issues etc as a friend would but this jealousy and attraction still remains.

N.B. I just want to state that i'm not hoping to end up in a relationship with her, not that i'd be opposed to it just that i'd be just as happy for the feelings to go away.

Also I know that i'm not a mother so i don't know if this will be deleted or not, I just need and appreciate opinions/advice. Thanks.

How do you know? Has she told you she doesn't or do you think she realises you have feelings for her? This may be why she doesn't cuddle you, so as not to lead you on.

It might be best to just tell her how you feel and say you think you should spend less time together.

I had this with my best friend, he started acting the same way you describe, trying to limit my time with other friends etc. He always told me he wasn't interested in me like that until he finally admitted it. Tbh it made me feel upset that he'd misled me and made me think our relationship was platonic when he had feelings for me because I wouldn't have spoken about a lot of the things we did with him, or spent so much time together. I ended up pulling back on our friendship as it just got uncomfortable. We're fine now we both have partners but we don't speak as much as we used to.

Oh dear, I don't think that the option you want is possible.
You have feelings for your best friend. You can't turn feeling off, you'll just end up getting hurt.
If you are sure she doesn't and won't feel the same then I would spend some time apart. Give yourself some time to get over it. Maybe make room for someone who will feel the same way about you. Don't get stuck in a situation where you can't win.

I think you have to be honest about your feelings, regardless of the reaction, and even if it ends the friendship. It would be better to not be friends than become jealous and try to control her.

Managing unrequited love is hard. Essentially, that is what broke my heart 20 years ago and it took me 4 years to recover.

But I stopped all contact, moved and got on with my life. You are young. You will get over this but you need to tell her and break the spell.

She's probably already aware given the behaviour you talk about here, RE jealousy.

Realistically, you're going to have to admit these feelings, and be honest with her about why you can't be in one another's lives anymore. Been on the unfortunate end of unrequited love myself, and the only thing I could do, was remove myself entirely from being around the person I was besotted with. They were not interested in me romantically, and it was too painful to interact with them knowing that, so I chose to extricate myself.

I’ve been where you are and told him. Turns out he’d already known, he’d been able to tell. He wasn’t interested (and was actually a bit of a dick about it) but with the benefit of hindsight I also see that he was leading me on and I was almost like his ‘backup plan’.

It hurt like hell at the time but was ultimately for the best as when I knew for certain there wasn’t hope I was able to move on. I didn’t realise how much I’d been holding on to hope until it had gone away.

We’re still good friends but now in terms of relationship material I now know I dodged a bullet.