Jay,
I have been feeling rather bad lately about the state of things between us, and I have felt that the appropriate thing to do is to explain why they changed...I hope that I can clear my good name at least in part. You’ll notice that over the past eleven months I haven’t had so many problems with anyone else. That’s because I’ve held you to a higher and likely unfair standard. For quite a while I am fairly sure I had the wrong impression of your intentions and I was interested in more than friendship. Reconciling my false hopes with reality has been the root of a lot of the problems I’ve had with you...
When we first met and started hanging out, I was fully aware that the disappointment I’m feeling now would be the possible outcome of any relationship with you, so I tried to keep things all business. The first time we ever hung out, I was focused on solely the task at hand until you took me out to dinner and then invited me back to your apartment to watch a movie. In the following weeks, casual meetings and conversations turned into marathon getting to know you sessions. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would be that genuinely interested in getting to know me and spending time with me one-on-one without having some greater motive. This is where I assume I got the wrong impression. You were my best bud all of fall semester, and I loved hanging out with you all the time. I felt like the feeling was mutual and the invitations to hang out were reciprocal and genuine.
Then at the beginning of this year, something changed. For you it was most likely just the settling of a new friendship into an old and familiar one. For me, I couldn’t figure out why I felt like things were so one-sided all of the sudden...Any time spent one-on-one has been initiated by me since the beginning of the year, and although we talked about doing many different things together, they have only happened if I took the driver’s seat...my misconceived idea of what our friendship really was in the first place got in the way of just letting go of insignificant disappointments in a normal, platonic relationship. I had no idea that the way you treated me is the way you treat everyone you’ve just met. I’m sorry I took it the wrong way...
I’ve been thinking about all of this a lot since the night Hair told me about her engagement and we talked on the phone for a couple hours. The morning after, despite having gone to sleep feeling much relieved, I felt awful. I can’t confide in you and not want more than friendship, and I couldn’t realistically hope to cry on your future shoulder when your heart belonged to someone else, to be fair to me and the potential “her.”
I’m sure you have noticed that the outcome of all of this has been a resolution to keep you at arm’s length until I can let go of my unproductive feelings...I also apologize in advance for any awkwardness this all may cause. In the meantime, I feel like I need more time away from you. With any luck, I hope we can find a new normal for our friendship by the end of summer. Unless you have some game-changing amendment to my reflection and reconsideration of things, I’d really rather not hash this out further, but I am willing to talk about it if you want to. I’m sure I will see you around soon.
