What I wish I’d known before falling in love with my best friend
A question that has plagued me for years now is ‘did I love her?’ Were the things that I felt something more intense than I allowed myself to believe at the time, or were they simply the result of an extremely close friendship at an age where emotional and sexual confusion is the norm? These are questions that I’m still not sure of the answer to today.
The friend in question was a high school friend. From year nine to the end of year eleven we were inseparable. It was an unlikely friendship that I can’t even recall how it began anymore, but when it did begin it blossomed. Soon we were seen as one and even teachers would question where the other was if we were seen alone.
It is also a friendship that abruptly came to an end when she moved back to live with her mum in the north after the end of high school. A finality that caused me so much pain it prompts the questions that I still ponder today. I have many friends now that I love, but there is still part of me that knows that the love I felt for her was different.
I can only imagine that many of these feelings stemmed from the fact that we shared many of the same experiences at the time. Family troubles, depression, self-harm. She was my support network and she understood what I was going through when no one else did, which undoubtedly encouraged some of the feelings I had. There is nothing more comforting and attractive than someone who truly understands your soul, especially at an age where emotional turmoil is the norm.
For everything that she helped me out with, I helped her out too. She had been in a relationship with a girl for many years, but when she moved to live with her dad he did everything he could to stop the relationship from continuing. In the age of smart phones and social media she was allowed nothing, not even an email address, just so she didn’t have the means to contact this girl. I then became the medium through which for them to communicate, creating my own independent friendship with her girlfriend as well as enabling their own, a situation which now when I look back was surely doomed to become messy. Maybe that’s something I wish I had known: don’t get involved with other people’s relationships no matter your intentions. But I just wanted her to be happy.
The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t really matter anymore if I loved her or not. It’s a friendship that to this day I am still sad is lost, but one that is probably never going to be rekindled. Besides the odd like on Instagram after she randomly followed me a few months ago we haven’t spoken for years now. I am in a happy relationship with my boyfriend and she has a new girlfriend, whom I sincerely hope she is happy with. I don’t even know if our friendship would be relevant anymore, all of the things that brought us together back then are not a part of our lives anymore. Friends and lovers alike more often move on than stay together.
However, is there anything that I wish I knew before potentially falling in love with her? I don’t think so. I don’t think there is anything to have known. We have experiences to learn from them, and the only way to learn from them is to have them. Perhaps the only thing I would like to know is did she feel anything for me?
