Spill the Tea with Tashi #13

SPILL THE TEA WITH TASHI COLUMN | ISSUE TWELVE | NOSTALGIA

Written & illustrated by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Editor-in-Chief

Scroll to the bottom of this webpage to submit your own question for Tashi to answer: https://www.debatemag.com/spill-the-tea-submissions

Q:  Do you have any advice on moving on from unrequited feelings for someone whilst maintaining your friendship with them? (In my case, it's a long-distance friendship). I know it might be better if I just stop talking to them, but at the same time I genuinely do like being friends with them. What do I do?  

From Tired Person (24)

A: Dear Tired Person, 

Unfortunately, there is no button you can press to immediately stop wanting someone. If there were, I imagine humanity would have discovered it shortly after fire and considerably before the wheel. But unrequited love feels like one of life’s great character-building experiences. Until you realise it doesn’t exist.

To be fair to you, there is no mention of love in your letter. You’ve described “feelings”, which is vague to say the least. But I shall assume the “feelings” are romantic, and that “unrequited” means you have confessed your “feelings” to your friend and been (romantically) rejected. I will give you my best advice based on these assumptions.

You don’t need to stop being friends with this person. But I do think you need to be ruthless with yourself about what “being friends” currently means. If you are finding it genuinely difficult to show up for this person because of your crush on them, then you’re not their friend. If you’re hanging around this person while silently hoping the situation will change, then you’re not their friend. Occupying the position of friend while actually functioning as a hopeful romantic prospect is, say it with me now, NOT FRIENDSHIP.

This kind of situation isn’t fair to either of you. It condemns you to a miserable little purgatory in which every interaction is a potential source of disappointment, and in turn, forces your friend to unknowingly participate in something they believe has already been resolved. 

I’m drawing a line between love and a crush here. A crush can exist entirely inside one person. Love, at least the romantic kind I’m talking about here, is something you build with another person. It requires reciprocity. It requires actually knowing someone, rather than knowing them and then filling in the gaps with everything you hope they might be. It has to exist, at least partly, in reality.

An unrequited crush doesn’t have to pass any of those tests. In fact, it can flourish quite happily without the other person’s involvement whatsoever. You can take a perfectly ordinary human being, add attraction, hope, projection and several hundred hours of thinking about them, and produce something that feels enormous. The enormity of the feeling does not necessarily tell you anything about the enormity of the relationship.

So in this humble advice columnist's opinion, “unrequited love” does not exist, but is merely a crush with a fancier-sounding name.

So what can you actually do about this? It’s tempting to assume long-distance would make this easier, but I fear that fact could make it even worse. So much of the relationship exists inside your phone and, consequently, inside your head. There are fewer boring real-life moments to puncture the fantasy. You’re not watching them chew too loudly or get road rage. You get concentrated doses of them: messages, calls, photos, the exciting bits. Your imagination gets to fill in everything else.

As I said earlier, I don’t think you need to disappear from their life completely. You might just need to stop talking every single day for a while. If you’re in the habit of four-hour late-night phone calls, switch to occasional one-hour calls. You could mute their Instagram stories so you’re not conducting forensic analysis on everyone who appears in the background. If this friend is the first person you tell big news to, try leaning on other friends instead. In short, try downgrading them from Main Character to Recurring Guest Star. Just until your feelings subside! 

And then comes the annoying advice that everybody gives because, unfortunately, it works: you need other things in your life. Other friends. Other crushes. Hobbies. Dates. Plans. Anything that reminds your brain there are approximately eight billion people on Earth and God did not put this particular person at the centre of the map.

You genuinely like this person, so the goal isn’t to stop caring for them. It’s to get to a point where liking them doesn’t come with a side of hoping they’ll eventually like you back. And if you can get there, you might actually get to keep the best part: the friendship.

And if you haven’t confessed your feelings and been romantically rejected, what are you waiting for? You might as well try to shoot your shot.