A little over a year ago, a night in February 2018 to be exact, I realized I (a Gay man) had fallen in love with my Straight best friend. It’s probably the worst thing that can happen to Gay men. In trying to make sense of it all, I stumbled across the following essay:
Falling for your Straight best friend is one of the oldest clichés in the gay book. And yet, time and again, it keeps happening. Maybe it’s the lure of the forbidden fruit that our innate human nature finds irresistible. Maybe it’s due to the emotional intimacy of the friendship. Maybe it’s because Gay people simply develop feelings way too easily. Whatever the case, falling for your Straight best friend is one of the most torturous things that can ever happen to a Gay person.
Although we know that our Straight BFF is unattainable, somewhere along the way, we stop listening to reason and let our hearts take over. Somewhere along the way, they become the person we want to spend every waking second of our lives with. And before we know it, we realize we’ve fallen for them.
The second you fall for your Straight best friend is the second you subject yourself to the deepest levels of emotional hell. You start to lose yourself in fantasies of what-ifs. You start to convince yourself that hey, maybe they’re Gay too. I mean, why else would they be so nice to us?
We become obsessed with trying to find out if that’s indeed the case. We start to overthink every single thing they’ve said. Over-analyze every message they’ve sent. All in the hope of finding a single shred of evidence that maybe, just maybe, they too are Gay and we would finally be able to turn our fantasies into reality.
But then more often than not, our Straight BFF is really what they say they are: Straight. So we start to develop a weird love-hate relationship with them. We hate them for giving less to the friendship than we do. We hate them for not looking forward to our meet-ups as much as we do. We hate them for not wanting us the same way we want them. But most of all, we hate ourselves for being so stupid for falling for them in the first place.
Yet, at the same time, we can’t help but continue to love them. We are there the second they need us. All because we know that deep down, it’s not their fault that we let ourselves fall in love with them. And so we resign ourselves to an abyss of emotional hell, in one of the worst states of friendzone someone can possibly find themselves in. And yet, unless we are prepared to cut them out of our lives completely, there is little that we can do to pull ourselves out of the hole we’ve so stupidly dug ourselves into.
So unless you want to find yourself in the above scenario, the minute you find yourself developing feelings for your Straight best friend:
STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THEM AS POSSIBLE!
My friend Andrew turned 50 last year. I organized a nice little birthday gathering for him, which was especially meaningful for everyone since he’s battling mantle cell lymphoma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_cell_lymphoma), and optimistically has another five years to live.
I’ve known Andrew for at least four years. I certainly considered him a friend before his cancer diagnosis several years ago, and as soon as I knew what he was facing, I promised myself that whatever support he needed, I would always be there for him.
We’ve always had a very easygoing, normal friendship. He has always treated me with nothing but kindness and respect. We’ve always had a great time playing backgammon together, laughing and ragging on each other in a good-natured way. He trusted me enough to go down to Tennessee with me for the big solar eclipse back in 2017, even when he know we’d be sharing the same motel bed (I had made the reservation a year earlier), which I’m sure was no small thing for him.
And YES, he is a perfectly normal, well-adjusted, relentlessly heterosexual guy. He is as Straight as a two-by-four, as we say. So imagine how horrified I was when I realized I had fallen in love with him.
It was one night last February, down at the little dive where we play backgammon. On this particular evening it was pretty crowded, and I was seated at a table with some friends of mine. At one point I spotted Andrew up near the bar talking with some other people, and he was laughing and gabbing and carrying on as he does. And I sat there, watching him, listening to his voice from across the room …. and suddenly I realized that as I was watching him and listening to him, I was slowly stroking the beard on my chin.
And I CAUGHT myself doing that, and I thought, “Whoa whoa WHOA, what are you doing? Stop that! What the fuck? Don’t even GO there, ha ha!”
But suddenly I was very alarmed at how I would be watching Andrew like that. And when I started thinking about it and examining my feelings, it began to dawn on me that I had been thinking about Andrew. A lot.
And that’s when I really , really started to PANIC.
As soon as I got home, I got online and started furiously Googling words and phrases and questions, and cross-referencing things in a desperate effort to find a website or a chat room or a discussion group where someone could give me some advice, because if I didn’t nip this thing in the bud, I was doomed. I was thinking, “I can’t believe this had to happen to ME! I don’t WANT this! I don’t NEED this! What do I do? What do I DO????”
Eventually I stumbled across the website I referenced above. And the words that I had reprinted above quite accurately described everything I was going through.
So panic gave way to pain. And the pain eventually gave way to deep, deep despair.
I’ve been asked if it’s lust. I would say NO. To be honest, if I had never known Andrew and passed him on the street, I wouldn’t give him a second thought. But now not a day goes by that I don’t think about him. And I don’t know what to do.
Even worse is that over the past year I have learned something very ugly about myself: My capacity for JEALOUSY. I’ve never had to deal with jealousy until the past year. And I HATE it. It’s NOT who I’m supposed to be!
I have always striven to be a kinder person, the best friend anyone could ever have, so that when it’s my time to go, at least I’ll be well spoken of and well remembered. I think that’s all any of us could ever ask for. And I was at peace with that, even if I finished out the rest of my life alone and unloved.
But when THIS happened, last February, that peace of mind I had achieved was fucked all to hell.
Some days are better than others, but the despair never really goes away completely. And whenever the despair hits me REALLY hard, it wears me down a little bit more. And I’ve reached a point where I don’t think there’s anything left to wear down.
2 comments
This is painful for sure. FWIW, for many a human, there is a human beyond their grasp, or an experience with someone that just can’t happen. Sometimes the best we can do is not to make our pain their pain. But yeah, your pain is real.
I can’t say I understand your Pain because we can’t know how much pain someone is experiencing. But I do know you are suffering greatly , I hope you find peace within yourself , and if you need someone to talk I am here , I could use some friend too .