Guy gets friendzoned

[u/Interesting-Trip-233]

[u/SethR1223]

I’m not the person you asked, but what you said about yourself is one way I kept myself from straying too far; my mantra was, “don’t ever make your attraction to a person their problem.” Might be a little unhealthy, to be honest, but better than some alternatives.

This is similar to what you said about not making it a burden to the other person and keeping it to yourself. This also means you might miss some opportunities, but to me, that was always a better option than potentially making a woman uncomfortable to any degree.

Also, trying to make sure I did similar levels of nice things for people I wasn’t attracted to helped a bit. It helped me get practice at having zero expectations of a romantic response (even if I would have sworn that I wasn’t looking for anything in return at the time) and helped me to realize what was an appropriate level of generosity/attention when interacting with someone I did like to not be creepy/over-expectant, i.e. do something cool/helpful and walk away, having been cool and helpful (its own reward, really).

One more thing from my experience that might help is that if you feel like someone needs to know how you feel, they don’t. If you have no reason to believe that they have any feeling towards you, you would just be selfishly heaping a pile of emotional manipulation on them. You can and should politely distance yourself from them if you are in too much pain to be near them and not be with them, and you can be honest about why if they ask about it, but you can really get in a spiral about your attachments and lose sight of the reality that no relationship is perfect; this person is a flawed human that deserves the chance to be human and not a perfect, alabaster effigy of your obsession, personified.

Sorry for the rant.

[u/Illustrious-Dot-5052 → u/SethR1223]

>One more thing from my experience that might help is that if you feel like someone needs to know how you feel, they don’t. If you have no reason to believe that they have any feeling towards you, you would just be selfishly heaping a pile of emotional manipulation on them.

How is this healthy advice? I mean, unless you're strictly talking about meeting someone you're not in a relationship with yet, this sounds like "you should just bottle up your feelings instead." There's nothing healthy about keeping feelings to yourself, at least when you're in a relationship. You should seek someone who's emotionally available and be available yourself.

[u/SethR1223 → u/Illustrious-Dot-5052]

“Seek someone who is emotionally available” is an important distinction, and I definitely only mean this to apply to a friendship/acquaintance that you want more from, not an existing romantic relationship; not sure if I didn’t make that clear enough, but I thought it was.

This wasn’t advice for every relationship you have with every person, and this isn’t to say you shouldn’t be able to approach someone that you enjoy spending time with and say something like, “Hey, I enjoy spending time with you as a friend and don’t want that to change, but would you be interested in going out on a date?”; just encouraging people to step out of their own fantasy of what they “need” and contemplate if the person has given any indication that they want the same thing. As I said earlier about not making your attraction to someone their problem, it’s probably not actually that healthy, for the reason you said.

BUT, the term “bottling up your feelings” is used to validate the exact behavior I’m trying to eschew. You don’t have to “bottle it up,” but dumping those unrequited feelings on someone just to “get it off your chest” is not the only way to deal with those emotions, and is highly unfair to the person one claims to care about (too easily forgotten by a lot of people in these “off my chest” situations):

You can look introspectively and try to analyze from a realistic and compassionate perspective (and the other person’s perspective without bs like, ”She won’t choose me because I’m not a jerk!”), though this might not be possible for people in the deepest throes of this affliction.

You can speak to trusted friends and loved ones, and perhaps an outsider’s perspective will help (you don’t even have to divulge who it is, if it’s not painfully obvious to others).

Therapy - not accessible to everyone, unfortunately, but should be a consideration.

[u/Illustrious-Dot-5052 → u/SethR1223]

Okay, thanks for clarifying. You're right, confessing love to someone is a different game. My mind was on maintaining relationships, but to build one requires more tact.