Guy friend confessed his feelings hours after my breakup
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Wait a second – he told you weeks ago he liked you, and you still reached out to him to be an emotional support for you? That is rather callous on your part.
I initially read this as he just confessed to you, and ever since then he’s been hassling you the past day or so. But you’ve been crystal clear on his feelings now for weeks.
I still stand by my statements that he was never really a friend to you, it was right of you to set a boundary and his behavior since has been shitty – but you also didn’t actually set a great boundary after all.
Just, stop being friends with this guy.
No, I didn’t reach out for emotional support. I didn’t expect him to console me at all. I just wanted to hangout and have a good time without feeling uncomfortable. Can’t see how that is callous.
I stopped going to him for any kind of emotional support/advice after he confessed he liked me.
I would push back still on the general suggestion that it was your turn to prioritize his feelings over your own. We are all, always, responsible for managing our own feelings. It’s never somebody else’s job to do that for us.
If he spent the past year and a half pining after her and putting her platonic feelings over his romantic ones, that was his call. She didn’t ask him to do that. He could’ve, months earlier, decided to put himself first and end a friendship that was painful for him to be in. Just because he put her feelings first (which arguably, that wasn’t his intent – his intent was to build up good guy karma to cash in at a later date), that doesn’t mean its her turn to return the favor.
That said, with the timeline clarification, when he confessed his feelings to you WEEKS ago LW, that should’ve been your signal that “Oh, this friendship isn’t what I thought, this isn’t a friend to reach out to in the wake of a breakup. A different friend for that.”
I mean, it’s about being emotionally intelligent.
If someone confessed their feelings to you at a very inappropriate and vulnerable time (when you were confessing to them about troubles in your current relationship), is it really the best idea to keep on with the friendship as though nothing has changed? You learned weeks ago this friendship is not what it thought. Again, it is/was his responsibility to not get all pissy at you for rejecting him, but a reasonable person should have been like, the friendship I’ve always understood as being one thing is not actually that thing, I can’t just pretend otherwise.
He should have been doing the same, but you know, you can’t really expect to keep hanging out with someone that just said they were in love with you like that didn’t happen.
Wait, this happened weeks ago?
If that’s the case, I can understand why he maybe misinterpreted the concert post-breakup hang out. It happens. He’s 19.
When someone wants more and you don’t, it doesn’t have to be a super dramatic thing or a betrayal necessarily.
Sometimes feelings do naturally just develop.
If he’s telling you he’s into you as more than a friend, you do need to tell him right then that you don’t think of him that way. You can’t just hope it’s a crush that will go away.
When I was 19, I signed a lease with my bf and four others. Then we broke up. The same day, one of my other roommates wrote me a five page letter professing his love for me. That was an awkward year.
I guess what I’m saying, its not your fault he had these feelings and its not your fault he’s handling them poorly, all the same you don’t have to be a social genius to predict that if you keep hanging out with someone weeks after they confessed they were in love with you, they will likely willfully ignore your previously stated disinterest and hold out hope you’re going to change your mind.
The onus technically is on him to remove himself from a friendship he can’t handle being in or that isn’t what he wants for himself, but you if you can see the feelings train crash coming, be sensible and get off that friendship track.
Come on now, I’ve hung out with a guy who said he had feelings for me and I rejected him. I just asked that we remained friends and because he wasn’t a toxic douchenozzle we actually stayed friends without weirdness. I’m still friends with him today over a decade later and he was at my wedding. Why is it OPs responsibility to manage him when she was clear with what she DIDN’T want? Same as with my friend I was clear and I took it in good faith he could handle it, it’s not OPs fault this guy couldn’t and continued looking for ways to creep in romantically. Now she’s obviously totally clued in but I don’t blame her for hoping he could put that aside.
I too have male friends who have expressed their interest but we are now friends. I think maturity has a lot to do with it. Some can move forward, some can’t. The guy friends I have who felt this way also weren’t doing some pining the whole time I was in another relationship or trying to get with me two seconds after I broke up. They basically just expressed some interest at an appropriate time and I kindly said I didn’t feel that way and we moved on. This guy is just DRAMA. I would block the hell out of anyone after a melodramatic social media post like that.
Yeah, if she did tell him clearly she only liked him as a friend, I agree with you that she didn’t have to stop hanging out with him, but if she ignored his comments and didn’t say anything just hoping his “crush” would go away, that was a bad move.
