Lauren Spencer
“The hardest thing in the world is to watch the person you love, love someone else.” This statement can be true for people in many situations. It can be from a person’s first love to someone’s hidden crush, but at one point in my life I felt just like this for my best friend, who I will call “Ron.”Having a best friend of the opposite sex and keeping the friendship strictly platonic is nearly impossible. The closest people in my life are guys, particularly Ron. For the past two and a half years, I have learned every aspect of him: all of his favorite things, his morals and beliefs, his pet peeves – even the subject of females alone is a chapter of his life that only few get to read. When you have learned almost everything about each other, you begin to click and understand one another on a level not many get to reach. One of the benefits of having a best friend of the opposite sex is being able to know what really goes on inside their heads. You get to learn firsthand the rules of “the game” when dealing with them. My mother always taught me that you cannot have a solid relationship with someone unless you are friends first. I feel that many relationships and marriages fail because people do not take the time to really get to know a person.Knowing that this guy is my best friend – the one who mom says makes the perfect life partner – and not have any feelings beyond our friendship, used to seem unrealistic to me. Then again, I have never been in a serious relationship, so how was I supposed to know if I was in love with him? The back-and-forth wondering of whether or not I was truly in love was becoming sickening. I knew the only way to stop this feeling was to get the strength to tell him.The day I finally told Ron my true feelings was the greatest relief of my life. We talked about everything and found out that the feelings were not mutual. Oddly, as time went on and knowing that there was no way we were going to be more than friends, I have grown out of liking him beyond our friendship. I guess what I was dealing with was infatuation and the strange excitement of him not knowing how I felt.I know now that what I was feeling wasn’t true love, but what I do know is that he is a true best friend and no matter what, nothing will ever change that.
