{"id":139259,"date":"2019-02-07T19:00:48","date_gmt":"2019-02-07T19:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.society19.com\/uk\/?p=139259"},"modified":"2019-02-07T18:18:50","modified_gmt":"2019-02-07T18:18:50","slug":"an-open-letter-to-that-girl-i-never-told-how-i-felt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.society19.com\/uk\/an-open-letter-to-that-girl-i-never-told-how-i-felt\/","title":{"rendered":"An Open Letter To That Girl I Never Told How I Felt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You\u2019re not supposed to fall in love with your friends. If I had a child, that would be the first piece of advice I would give them when they got to dating age. Make any and every mistake possible: break some hearts and have your heart broken a few times, date someone totally wrong for you and let that seemingly perfect person go, feel bad about all that, learn from it and become a fully rounded person. But never, EVER, fall for one of your friends.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>If only it were that simple\u2026<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Of course, that isn\u2019t how it works. Falling in love is such a strange, unquantifiable event and it simply isn\u2019t in our control. If it was, I would never have fallen for you. I wouldn\u2019t have had to keep hanging out with you, all the while having to stop myself telling you how I felt. I wouldn\u2019t have let our friendship quietly die because the coward\u2019s way out seemed far preferable to the other outcome. In my head, telling you how I felt could only go one of two ways: 1) you would tell me that you didn\u2019t feel the same, and then it would become too weird and we would never speak again, or 2) you would tell me that you did feel the same but it would be too weird because we\u2019re friends and we wouldn\u2019t want to ruin that so, instead, we never speak again. I chose the alternative: ignore my feelings and, ultimately, my friendship with you too, and then never speak again. Before you say it: yes, I see the irony, but I was scared and that was the only way of making it through.<\/p>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: center\"><br style=\"font-size: 10.72px\" \/><span style=\"font-size: 10.72px\"><\/span><\/h6>\n<h2><strong>Admitting it to myself was hard enough, let alone telling you<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>I can still pinpoint that moment when I had to accept that I didn\u2019t feel right about you anymore. It was a sudden click, one of those instantly altering changes where everything goes from normal to un-normal. We went out to the beach with all the others to light fires and drink heavily, like some delinquents from a cheap romcom. I don\u2019t remember how we got separated from the rest of the group, but I do remember you laughing and holding my hand as you had to practically drag me away from the water that I was insistent I was going swimming in. It was like magic. Your hand in mine was electricity and I felt like I\u2019d been switched on for the first time. When we finally found the rest of our friends again, my world had changed. It seems ridiculous doesn\u2019t it? No words exchanged, no grand romantic gestures, nothing even remotely sexual, just two friends doing something that any two friends could do. To this day, I still wonder whether you had the same experience in that moment. Somehow, I doubt it.<\/p>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: center\"><br style=\"font-size: 10.72px\" \/><span style=\"font-size: 10.72px\"><\/span><\/h6>\n<h2><strong>Under the surface<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>I also wonder whether you noticed that I was acting differently around you after that. I didn\u2019t mean to be if I was. I was trying to be normal, as if nothing had changed at all. For a while, I tried to pretend that nothing had. But then I would see you, and the butterflies in my stomach would rise up, trying to push out the words to tell you how I felt. Every moment became a balancing act of trying to be normal without it slipping out.<\/p>\n<p>My lowest point was seeing you and him chatting at the bar after we\u2019d been to that awful gig. I have no doubt that, had our friends known how I felt, they wouldn\u2019t have tried so hard to get you together with him. I guess that\u2019s partially my fault. I\u2019ve completely and wholeheartedly moved on, but I can still feel the point of the knife in my heart as I came up the stairs from the bathroom to see you kissing him. World-shattering, frankly. It\u2019s the only time I\u2019ve ever understood what people mean when they talk about feeling \u201cweak at the knees\u201d. I drank a lot to compensate, hoping I would forget that image. How well that went.<\/p>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: center\"><br style=\"font-size: 10.72px\" \/><span style=\"font-size: 10.72px\"><\/span><\/h6>\n<h2><strong>Letting you go<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>As bizarre as it sounds, I had to do the same emotional processing to move on from my feelings for you as I normally do after a break-up. I had to remind myself of why we couldn\u2019t be together, why we would never work together and that it was better off this way. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn\u2019t, I\u2019ll never truly know and I\u2019ve made my peace with that. I certainly wish I could still message you at 2am with a pointless thought, and have you reply as if it\u2019s the most important thing in the world. God knows I miss that.<\/p>\n<h2>Did you ever tell them how you felt? Do you wish you did? Did you end up together? Let us know below\u2026<\/h2>\n<h6>Featured image:\u00a0https:\/\/pixabay.com\/en\/red-rose-in-snow-lost-love-3928306\/<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You\u2019re not supposed to fall in love with your friends. If I had a child, that would be the first piece of advice I would give them when they got to dating age. Make any and every mistake possible: break some hearts and have your heart broken a few times, date someone totally wrong for&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25043,"featured_media":139260,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1805],"tags":[8120,16871,8775],"thb-sponsors":[],"class_list":["post-139259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-relationships","tag-friends","tag-how-i-felt","tag-love"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>An Open Letter To That Girl I Never Told How I Felt - Society19 UK<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How I felt but could never find the courage to say face-to-face. 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