Backstory: I’ve been friends with this person for around a year, but we’ve grown much closer in the last few months. We met on Tinder, but both of us were coming out of pretty serious relationship blues. I’ve always kind of liked her, but I viewed it as more important to be friends than to treat her as any kind of interest. I have no real idea of what she thinks of me in that regard, we’ve never really discusssed feelings towards one another.
In the past few months, I’ve felt a passing interest turn into something much stronger. I think it really started around my birthday, when she surprised me at my job with flowers and some sweaters for me, along with a really heartfelt card. Ever since then I think about them all of the time, whenever I go anywhere I look for trinkets for them, always thinking of songs they might like or movies, she’s just on my mind a lot. They’re very very cool to me. She really values me as well, and always tells me that I’m important to her.
Neither of us are super-romantic people, though she has struggled with relationships more than me. She’s mentioned that a lot of the time she didn’t really “get” relationships. I feel anxious that bringing up that I like her may be poisonous to our friendship. We have both talked about how we’ve had friendships that were ruined by other people’s desires. I worry a lot that my feelings aren’t mutual, and that my feelings could develop into a sort of envy and could destroy my friendship with someone I care about a lot.
My friends and my sister have kind of treated me like I’m crazy for thinking that she might not like me, that when I describe things it seems obvious to them, when I don’t feel that way.
Is there anyway to go about this in a way that wouldn’t be destructive?
tldr: I like a close friend, and I want to tell them but I fear that doing so could put our friendship in jeopardy