Welcome to Dear Sybersue! Navigating Love After Friendship

In this week’s upload, I answer Barry’s question: “I Was Intimate With A Good Friend But Now She Isn’t Talking to Me! What should I do?

Dear Sybersue.

After sleeping with one of my best friends things have changed drastically between us! What should I do, I really like her! She was very loving and passionate with me that evening! We hugged and kissed goodnight and everything seemed pretty great when she left. Or so I thought!

We are both single. Is it not OK to jump out of the friend zone? Can I try to have a relationship with her? Am I wrong to want to go there?

Has this ever happened to you Sybersue?

Could this be the end of our 5-year friendship because we crossed that boundary? We used to see each other a few times a week and texted each other often as well. For the past two weeks, there has been little more than a few words spoken between us!

I miss her a lot. How should I handle this? I don’t want to freak her out.

Barry

Dear Barry,

This is a question that many men and women have struggled with over the years. When you have a really great friendship, the line between romance and friendship can become blurred. All it takes is one evening of curiosity to alter 5 years of platonic boundaries.

This isn’t a bad thing!

Sexual chemistry is important in a committed partnership. However, being great friends will keep you connected in an even bigger way. (Especially as we get older!)

You have to like each other to really love each other. <3

I applaud you for taking the chance and making an effort with this woman. Love can often be right in front of us. We are fearful of it because we are holding on to old stereotypes in our heads. “It will ruin our friendship, it’s not worth it!”

Since you asked… I can tell you from two of my own experiences that it is worth it! I lost one really great guy friend and I married the other.

Do I have regrets that one of my long-term friendships is over? Yes, I did for about 6 months because I missed our daily banter.

I later discovered that this friendship was really always based on the hot and powerful chemistry lurking between us. We just lied to ourselves, until the day we got inebriated enough to cross the bridge to our real desires!

We tried to be more than friends after this first encounter. It just felt too weird. The chemistry was still there though. We also tried going back to being “just friends” but that felt strange too. We went back to dating other people but experienced some territorial problems. It caused us to end our friendship more abruptly than I would have liked. I think it was based on jealousy for both of us.

Sometimes things happen like this to make you move on because the friendship has run its course.

Spending too much time with the wrong person can keep you from meeting the right person. This happens even when you’re just hanging out in the friend zone!

The second experience was definitely a friendship first and that is really all I wanted. I met him through my brother who had just become my temporary roommate. This guy was recently single after the end of a long marriage and kept popping over to visit my brother.

Long story short, he hung out more and more and we started to chat a lot. He began to ask me many dating and relationship questions which I was happy to answer. I helped him buy new clothes to get him back out into the dating market etc. I enjoyed spending time with him.

I didn’t realize he had become interested in me. He was biding his time while I dated others. He was also finding his way after his long-term relationship ended.

I invited him to my birthday party 5 months later. There, he decided he had had enough of being silent about his feelings for me. At the end of the evening, he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder. He carried me down the stairs and out the door. That definitely got my attention and we have been together ever since our first kiss that night.

So, Barry, you have two choices on what to do here.

You can call her up and tell her exactly what you feel. Or, you can sit back and spend the next few years wondering what would have happened if you had taken a chance on finding LOVE with this woman.

She may not be contacting you because she is afraid. She thinks “you’re the one” who isn’t interested in a romantic relationship with her. You haven’t exactly taken control of what happened and knocked on her front door. A few texts aren’t going to cut it. She needs to see and feel that it wasn’t a mistake to move your friendship to a different level.

Tell her how you feel and ask her to be really honest with you. If she isn’t invested in having a committed partnership with you, then you both need to decide how to move ahead. Can you go back to being just friends again? Would this be a possible scenario now that you have shared this intimate time together? Ask her where she wants to go from here?

You have spent quite a bit of time with your lady friend over the past 5 years. Both of you are still single so maybe this is the moment you have both been waiting for. Something needed to happen to set you in the right direction.

At this point, I would say that it is definitely worth exploring and see what transpires for you both. Pretending it didn’t happen is not the answer, and having clear communication is important now. Don’t spend the next couple of years wondering “what if?” Figure it out now.

Thanks for writing Barry, let me know what happens!

Sybersue

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 Sybersue xo

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