Speaking on behalf of any woman who has had the tendency to get crushes on one or more of their guy friends, the worst feeling is hearing that awful phrase: "you're one of the guys" or "I think of you as a sister." Or, God forbid you gather up the courage to tell them how you feel and they pull one of those lines or even the dreaded, "you're not what I think of as girlfriend material."
After hearing these words that come straight from our worst nightmares, we gotta play it cool and take the rejection, while not showing how you're really feeling on your face even though you're actually DYING INSIDE.
Now, guys, we get that this sort of rejection probably happens to you a lot more than it does to us, but here's two fundamental differences between you getting rejected and us getting rejected:
First off, guys, you do it a lot more, so you've got more "at-bats" so-to-speak than we girls do, so when rejection happens, you're a lot more used to it than we ladies are... usually.
Seconds, girls, we aren't used to putting ourselves out there or making the first move, so when we finally gather up the courage to do the scary thing and set ourselves up for possible failure, and we do get rejected, it just hurts that much more.
So now we get to suffer the wonderful torture that is being your girl best friend. We get all of the perks of being a 'girlfriend' without any of the actual relationship stuff. We're the ones who you vent to, share with, and spend your time with, but at the end of the day, we don't get to be the ones you come home to or who you want to spend forever with.
Sometimes I wonder if it's better or worse to have your best friend tell you they think of you as a sister before you have the chance to tell them how you feel, or after. Because if they tell you this before, you lose all hope, and you didn't get to say how you feel, and in my case, when this happens, it plants a question in my head, which is: maybe they only see me as a sister because they never thought to look at me as anything more, and maybe if I say it, they will look at me in that way, and see someone they like, and not just "one of the guys."
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