Chris Listens: Falling for Your Best Friend

EDITOR'S NOTE: On Wednesday, September 9, SparkNotes will present Dropping the F: Chris's Guide to Finding Love With Your BFF. If you've ever crushed out on one of your friends, be sure to check back on Wednesday for Chris's detailed strategies and tips for converting your friend into something more!

No one's exactly sure how it happens. One minute, your friend is just your friend. The two of you hang out incessantly, crack up at the same hedgehog jokes, and cringe at the same bad lines in decent movies. Everything is cool. The next minute, for a reason that science cannot explain, you feel a vague twinkling in your upper ventricle, followed quickly by a slight fluttering in your stomach. You look at your friend and think, "You know, I really wouldn’t mind covering you head to toe in gentle smoocheroos." Wait, what? You’ve never even used the word "smoocheroos" before. Before you even know it, everything has changed.

Lately I've received boatloads of missives from confused Sparklers who are crushing on their friends—in many cases, their best friends. Most of these questions have come from girls who are enamored of their guy friends. But a fair number came from guys crushing on female pals, guys crushing on guy friends, and girls crushing on girls. This leads me to believe that we live in a world of perpetual friend crushing. And the one thing all these crushers have in common is that none of them has the slightest idea what to do about his or her feelings.

This crushing cluelessness makes sense. If you do the math, which involves running polynomials through an abacus, there are approximately 18,474,935,387 variables that spring from these crush situations: moves one could make, words one could say, emails or text messages one could send, and the many ways that the crushed-on friend could respond—or not respond—to these tactics.

Every friend-to-crush situation is different, but in this post we'll examine a few of the more common scenarios. Next Wednesday, I'll present my guide to crushing on your best friend without, um, crushing the friendship.

The Classic Best Friend Crush

Real-life Sparkler example: I think I may be falling for my best guy friend. We've been friends for two years now and just recently I have started to like him more and more but I have no idea if he likes me more then a friend. I want to tell him but I'm too afraid, any ideas on how I can tell him that I like him without freaking him out and changing our friendship forever?

My take: Best friends often turn into serious crushes because you already do 90% of the things that couples do, including fight over which dog breed is the cutest overall. And all it takes to move your platonic relationship into a new cuddly realm is one tiny spark of physical attraction, which, with hormones working overtime during adolescence, can occur at any moment and set off an uncontrollable conflagration.

The I-Like-Him-But-Now-He’s-Dating-Someone-Else

Real-life Sparkler example: Just to clarify I am a girl and my best friend is a guy. We have been really close for about 2 years and about a year in we got really close and we are now BEST FRIENDS. He's amazing. When we first started hanging out I had a bit of a crush on him, but he got together with a girl from another school. They have been together now for as long as my friend and I have been friends. Recently I revealed to him that I had liked him for that first month, and he told me that he had liked me too, but not at that time. He hesitantly explained that he liked me for a while, and likes me currently. He hasn't had any trouble or anything with his GF, he says he’s just in love with me too.

My take: We humans always seem to want what we can’t have, and sometimes it takes seeing your best friend with someone else to awaken your deeper desires. It's also possible that observing their relationship can show you what stellar dating skills your best friend possesses, causing you to want to get in on that action.

My Friend Likes ME

Real-life Sparkler example: Well I kind of have a problem I don't know what it is but I really like this guy, let's call him Fred and well a couple of years back me and Fred were best friends but then he started to like me and I didn't like him so well we stopped talking because it was too awkward.

My take: Reverse best friend crushes are no easier to deal with because you didn’t decide to take things forward. This does take some uncertainty out of the whole enterprise, but now you can’t just wait out your feelings. Your friend has opened up to you and you have to react.

The Let’s-Not-Ruin-Our-Friendship

Real-life Sparkler example: A very close friend of mine and I have both expressed romantic interest in each other, but he has repetitively mentioned that he's not sure if he wants to be in a relationship and wants to stay just friends.

My take: This is probably the best-case scenario because right away everyone is aware of the potentially lousy consequences of dating a close friend. However, things can get complicated when one person wants to stay just friends and the other wants to go on a hot date.

The Bi/Gay Twist

Real-life Sparkler example: One of my close friends is bi and I might or might not like him as more then a friend. Yeah like I said, awkward. Umm, so he's already had a boyfriend so how weird would that be if he then has a girlfriend? Especially since many people think he's gay not bi.

My take: Awkward indeed. Having designs on a bisexual friend is probably the trickiest type of crush because well, things could go either way. If you're a girl, you might think, “What happens if we break up and then he goes out with a guy? Does that reflect badly on me?” (The answer is no, BTW.)

The Gay/Bi Twist

Real-life Sparkler example: I'm a 16 year old girl in a public high school and I'm in love with my best friend who happens to be a gay guy. There we go, there's my problem. What do I do? He's not like totally gay, he's bisexual but leans towards boys, so it's like I have a chance, but not really.

My take: We actually fielded the above query in a Chris Listens post a few months back. But falling in love with your gay friend does pose a bit of a problem because of the inherent potentially insurmountable obstacles. Some people attempt to surmount them anyway.

Check in next Wednesday for Dropping the F: Chris's Guide to Finding Love With Your BFF. In the meantime, let me know what kind of friend-crush shenanigans you've been involved in, or heard about, or just imagined. Drop a comment or write a novel to chris@sparknotes.com.