Dear KitschMix,

I’ve been best friends with this girl for years now and it didn’t take me long to realize that what I felt for her was (and still is) waaay more than just friendship.

She doesn’t know I’m gay. In fact no ones does, but I’ve just found out she’s dating a guy, and I feel heart broken.

But being the good friend that I am, I just pretended to be really happy for her. I’m far from happy, and the guy she is seeing is creep (who a month ago tried it on with me). In fact another of our friends told her this.

He is also very possessive, wants her to spend all her time with him, and when they’re out together he’ll always pulls her away for private chats.

In other cases, I’ll be talking with her, and then he decides that he wants all of her attention, so he’ll constantly be distracting her from me.

There are lots of other details about him that utterly disgust me because he’s just gross in general with his touchiness and over-attachment, but I’ll spare you all the details.

Essentially, even before I met him, everyone I knew thought that he was really creepy.

Now I’m just praying that they will break up. The very idea of them being together (and having sex) extremely breaks my heart.

I feel so stuck. I want her in my life, but watching her with the guy is so hard to take. I don’t think her feelings for me are mutual, so do I bow out.

I want to be honest with her. I don’t want things to be awkward between us, so I’m not saying anything. But I Hope that I can one day I can express my love verbally and physically to this amazing woman without this guy being in the picture, and it just being us together.

This sounds like a horribly painful situation, and I am sorry to hear you’re stuck in it. In some cases, when we have a crush on someone, we may accidentally paint their current partner as the bad guy. Since you’re telling me that other friends have noticed (and pointed out) this behaviour, I’ll assume that’s not the case here.

Unfortunately, if you value your friendship with this woman, there isn’t a lot you can do to make your feelings known without risking the situation going incredibly uncomfortable. I’m the type of person to try and make my feelings known anyway, but the situation is always more complicated when they’re seeing someone.

I think I have a couple different stories for you, to try and help you figure out what you should do:

First: I was in your position.

My best friend and I had literally been friends since the day we were born. (Yes, same day.) We lost touch a couple of times, for a couple of years at a time, but somehow we always found our way back to each other. One day, I started to notice I had very strong feelings for her. She said she felt the same way, but I think she was trying to avoid the situation getting awkward.

Eventually I found myself in the position where I could save her from the bad situation she was in – so I did. My feelings for her grew a little deeper once she was living with me. In my head, I thought, “She just has to feel the same way now.” (Now that I’ve grown a little, I know better – no one is obligated to be with you just because you do nice things for them, but you should do nice things anyway.)

After she had lived with me for a couple of months, we decided to give it a shot, and we started dating – but she was more attracted to men. Men who I personally would consider losers (even when viewed objectively – one of them happened to be my own brother). We tried to make it work for a while, but it was doomed from the start.

August marks seven years since we broke up, and the friendship definitely isn’t the same. She’s actually still with my brother, though, and as much as I resented their relationship initially, I can see now that they’re better together than me and her would have been together, even if for no other reason than I wasn’t what she really wanted.

If you tell your friend how you feel, even if it does result in a relationship, this is something you may risk.

Second: I was in her position.

My next story is a little more recent, and the details aren’t quite the same, but I think it has an equal chance of applying as my first story, above. In this scenario, I was “unofficially” dating someone who I thought was just wonderful – even though everyone else (including the friends who set us up!) was telling me she was a total jerk.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, someone else started talking to me. She was attracted to me, and she made that known from the start – but she never pushed the issue. She let me vent to her about the woman I was seeing and all her crazy mean antics (which can be a really nice quality in a friend, trust me). Whenever I brought up my unhappiness with my current situation, she’d gently offer an alternative – but she would never try to make a move on me unless I initiated it.

A few months later, I had finally had enough with the crap the girl I was seeing put me through, and I called things off. The Friend was still there waiting, and she still had feelings for me – and eventually I opened my eyes and saw that she was actually going to treat me right. (I think my exact words were that she was everything that I hoped the other girl was going to be eventually… Right from the start.)

We just celebrated our second anniversary in December – and she’s still one of my best friends. Sure, she irritates me to no end, and we do have some arguments. But we started from friends, so we have extra motivation to work them out instead of walking away.

If you tell your friend your feelings, this is a real possibility, too.

But every situation is different.

There’s no way for me to predict what’s going to happen in your situation – I can only tell you what happened in my personal situation. I’ve been in situations where my friend and I talked it out and decided against pursuing anything, and we’re still best friends almost ten years later.

Your decision on whether or not to tell her may be shaped by whether you decide to come out or not – because if things go badly, there is a chance that she could out you. (If she’s a good best friend, she won’t, but sometimes that’s hard to tell right away.) Truthfully, there are so many different possibilities – but you’ll never know until you tell her how you feel!

Try and remember to respect the relationship, but as her best friend you are allowed to let her know that her boyfriend is a waste of her time. Just make sure that your feelings for her aren’t clouding your judgment, and remember that the final decision is hers to make.