How have you messed up a perfectly good platonic friendship?

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1. Sex… sex usually does that

2. Falling in love. We’re still close friends and I appreciate our friendship a whole lot, but it gets emotionally complicated and painful sometimes.

3. Pulling away. It takes me a while to warm up to new people and once I do my true personality shows. I am a very quiet and shy person generally but my personality around people I am comfortable with is more energetic and slightly aggressive so people are usually taken aback when they see that for the first bit. Soon after, I start to assume they hate me, are annoyed, etc. so I pull away, i stop engaging and even if they didn’t hate me, the relationship died because I am not feeding it.

4. Feelings and miscommunications. Yet again I think everyone has their own life that they need to live.

5. Unintentionally isolating during tough times

6. I got jealous of my best guy friend who’d recently started a relationship with another friend, while they were at my place I got drunk, she was gonna leave but he’d stay over, I insinuated that he can sleep in my bed instead of couch if he wanted, he awkwardly laughed it off, she acted like she did not hear it. Obviously things got weird between us real fast after that night. I loathed myself when I got sober. Even if they’re not together we barely talk anymore.

7. I met this dude when we were in high school and quickly developed a huge crush on him. We never seemed to be single at the same time, and I was too shy to make a move on him anyway, so we remained just friends for a long time. We were even roommates for a couple years. During that time I discovered that he and I would definitely never work out romantically–our desires and life goals were wildly different–so while I was certainly still attracted to him, it made things easier knowing that us as a couple wasn’t really a possibility.

   After over a decade of friendship, and following a couple years of me living in a different city, we were both single and had a few one-on-one hangout times. One of these nights we were at a popular local hipster bar and my liquid courage inspired me to bring up the fact that he and I had never made out. He said, “So…do you want to make out then?” I said yeah, and we left the bar. Walked back to my place and had some really hot makeouts on my couch. I confessed that I’d basically been in love with him since high school, but wasn’t interested in a relationship.

   The next time he came to my place, our clothes came off (we didn’t have sex, but we did other things). I realized that, while I found him attractive, I wasn’t really turned on at all and felt like I was just going through the motions. He must have had the same realization and asked if we could stop. So we did. He said he didn’t think he could do a friends-with-benefits thing with me and apologized. I said it was fine, and that I was feeling similarly weird about it. We put our clothes back on, finished the episode of Game of Thrones we’d been watching, then he went home. Things seemed normal.

   But we didn’t really hang out much after that. After my confession about my long-term crush on him, I don’t think he believed that I felt as weird about having sex with him as he probably did with me. We never really talked about it after that, but a distance was there. I moved out of state about a year later. He got married not long after that, which I learned about on social media (NGL that stung quite a bit). I did invite him to my wedding when I got married last year, and it was the first time I’d seem him in over five years. Other than that though, we don’t really talk outside of trading the occasional likes on Instagram. It makes me sad. He was once one of the most important people in my life.

8. Not disclosing remotely the full extent + severity of my mental health issues in the hopes of trying to appear “normal” and not broadcasting to the entire world that I’m a severely and irreparably damaged traumatised mess.

   Gradually becoming exhausted of maintaining the facade of normally and or having an episode then either slowly or v. rapidly becoming extremely reclusive and eventually completely ghosting and disappearing off the face of the earth without a trade or explanation.

   Last but not least continuing to ignore and avoid any and all of their attempts at reaching out due to feeling a potent combination of shame, guilt, overwhelmed and unworthy.

9. We were best friends since kindergarten but once we got to high school she became obsessed with her boyfriends and their families. She would only come back to me when it was convenient/they broke up. When she went off to college she didn’t reach out to me once until she asked if we would still go on our annual summer trip. At that point I said no, and we never really spoke again. She reached out to me when my Papa passed away, I said I would love to meet and catch up when if she was ever back home, but nothing ever happened. I miss her sometimes, but it seems like too much time has passed, and it always seemed too one sided for it to be worth worrying about.

10. Feeling like my very existence is a burden to them and drifting away to protect them

11. Just not making the effort to regularly hang out and keep in touch. They didn’t either though, so…

12. He fell for me. I rejected him (nicely). I got drunk one night about a year later and came onto him (appropriately, did not touch him – just verbally said I wanted to sleep with him if he wanted.) He felt used and slighted/too little too late. Never spoke to me again. Made me really sad as we were friends for about 5 years. I apologized but it wasn’t enough. Big regret for me. Not that we didn’t hook up. I’m actually glad we didn’t. Just sad it got so messy and he basically ghosted me after a 5 year friendship.

13. Having sex with them lmao.

14. When each side has a different expectation for the level of time and energy to be expended on the friendship. The ‘more committed’ side comes away feeling undervalued, like the other person doesn’t care, and the ‘less committed’ side feels pressured and that the other person is clingy or overbearing.

15. I married him.