Forgive me friends, for I had feelings

A friends-to-lovers story gone wrong, two times over.

Illustration by Natalie McNulty

Written by Alison Poppe

Watching from the carpeted floor as Jordyn gets ready for work, I see flashes of my former feelings.

Shaky eyes fixating upon the hands clenched in my lap, trembling breath staggering up my chest and puffing out between rosy cheeks.

I feel something similar now, with a hammering behind my ribs bracing itself to plunge from my chest — falling at her feet.

Jordyn and I met through her befriending my roommate, Lily. She then quickly settled into a couple of my social circles — making it so I would only see her in group settings.

The moment I realized that I could like Jordyn began in a setting worthy of a movie screen. It was the first time we hung out one-on-one, watching the sunset at Boulevard Park with a container of untouched grapes between us.

Revealing my past feelings a year into our relationship seems long overdue to me. While I’ve become an expert in hiding behind a cool exterior, the bubbling emotion inside never ceased. It’s waited up until now to make itself known to her.

How would I even say this? “I may have been in love with you?” No. Too forward.

Maybe something along the lines of, “For six months, I tensed up whenever you walked into the room and I don’t know why?”

How do I come clean when I can’t even wade through the muddy waters of my feelings?

Schachter and Singer’s theory suggests that emotion has two separate components: physiological arousal and cognitive label. The arousal is similar in all emotions we feel, including a mix of increased heartbeat, sweating, and dilated pupils.

The cognitive label that we attribute to those feelings can be misidentified or relabeled. Arousal may come up for one reason but get another label, thereby producing a different reaction.

“This is kind of a little confession: When you and Lily started becoming better friends, around this time last year, I had a crush on you.” I blurted out. “Like acrush.”

Jordyn starts laughing before I finish, “Did you really?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Oh.”

She briefly brings her hands up to her face, but she can’t stop chuckling.

When I ask her if she’s surprised, she tells me that she is — according to her, at that time I wasn’t acting like I had romantic feelings for her. Instead, I was “totally chill.”

I’ve wondered how long I could hold up that mask, and if anyone saw the feeble hand weary of holding it up.

Owen was blind to it for three years, no matter how many times he crashed on my couch when he was in town. It wasn’t until two years of the mask periodically slipping off for me to decide to rip it off.

In the soft morning glow of my dining room, there is only a serene contentedness while I try to muster up the courage to bring up my former feelings to him. Staging my confession as an interview made me feel like I had a bit more control of the situation.

A deep breath. “So. Big reveal. For a year — on and off — I had a crush on you.” I said with hesitance in my voice.

“K,” he shoots back, going back to stirring his coffee.

He doesn’t question me but I feel the need to explain further.

“The thing is, the timeline is really skewed cause I don’t remember when it started or when it stopped.”

“Yeah.”

“But it was around sophomore year.”

Even bringing this up feels kind of ridiculous; I think he realizes this too as we both start laughing, the interview dissolving into our usual banter.

While these friendships didn’t end in a relationship, I wouldn’t trade what I have with these two people for anything else.

In an article published by the Social Psychological and Personality Science Journal in 2022 titled,

“The Friends-to-Lovers Pathway to Romance: Prevalent, Preferred, and Overlooked by Science,” found relationships formed first by friendships were common and preferred among university students.

Their results included the average time for the pre-relationship friendship: 21.9 months. Nearly 22 months’ worth of two people pining over each other until someone spills their secret affections. A favorite among the movie tropes.

But what happens when the mixed messages never end and the public declaration of love — followed by a New Years’ kiss at midnight, of course — never happens. What follows instead are the countless late hours of the night spent reflecting on past interactions, wondering what every tease, glance and compliment meant to the other.

The times he offered me his sweatshirt, or she laughed at my jokes used to be filtered through heart-eyed vision — an expectation of what our friendship could turn into. Looking back, it was obvious that I misread the setting as romantic, but at the time I felt like this friendship might turn out different; it would be my turn to be the love interest.

Now, I don’t have to try as hard to make Jordyn laugh and I don’t pretend to like whiskey at my taste buds’ expense whenever I get drinks with Owen.

What changed was the removal of the rose-tinted glasses, no longer seeing mere kindness as an indication of romantic interest. I’m back to being the comedic relief side character.

It might take 22 days, weeks, or months of trying to find the perfect moment when you feel confident enough to bare your feelings to another person. Confessing your feelings remains terrifying.

So, friends, I love you.

But not in that way.