I was in love with my straight best friend and here’s what happened

There are many lesbian rites of passage but the one that takes the cake is falling for your straight best friend. It is a tale as old as time for us sapphic folk and for some reason we just can’t seem to learn our lesson. The hard lesson that every dyke eventually learns is that your straight best friend will never love you back…at least not in the way you want her too. I know it hurts to hear but trust me the sooner you accept it the happier you will be.

A few years back I was this girl. The girl that was hopelessly in love with her straight best friend. Here is how the story started. We became fast friends at work and even after I moved into a new job we kept hanging out. We will call her candice*, obviously not her real name. During the Candice years, we would do everything together, my weekends would revolve around if I was seeing Candice and what activity we would be doing. We went clubbing, to markets, to the beach, to get waxed, to the cinema’s, one time we even booked an impromptu trip to Bali. Safe to safe she was my absolute BFF and I worshipped the ground she walked on. It didn’t take long into our intense friendship that I realised I definitely had more than friendly feelings for her. And it didn’t take long after that for me to be head over heels in Love. This girl had me under some sort of spell and I was loving every minute of it…. at first.

Candice was an absolutely gorgeous woman and to me, it was magnified by 1000 because her personality was so amazing. There were things about her as well that really made me question whether she might be into me as well. She was 26 and had never lived with a boyfriend, she was into fast cars and she never used a handbag. (LOL) seriously these were the only clues I had to go off. She was fun and flirty toward me and she seemed to be as invested in our “friendship” as I was. We would speak on the phone regularly during the week which I didn’t do anywhere near as much with my other friends. We would come home drunk, sleep in the same bed and stay up late talking about everything. One night out at a club she kissed me on the cheek and it gave me goosebumps. As if I needed any more concrete proof that I was attracted to her but that certainly sealed the deal. I was into it big time. We would joke all the time that if were still single by the time she was 40 we would marry each other. I loved it, nothing physical ever happened and yet to me, it felt like I was in a full blown relationship with this woman.  Everything was going great…. until she got a boyfriend. We will call this boyfriend “Liam”

There was nothing wrong with Liam, funnily enough I knew him from high school and from the old workplace but I hated his guts. I was overwhelmed with jealousy when they would hang out, it was like a knife was being driven into my heart every time she would talk about him. Eventually, they did break up but then she started dating other men casually and that was even worse. It also brought out some of the worst behaviour in me when I met some of these men. (but I won’t get into that) Now at this point you are probably thinking there was no way I could still possibly think she was into me. The truth is that deep down by this point I knew that she was straight but I did not want to believe it. I was in denial city and as long as I could stay there I could still imagine a future where she would realise that her real soul mate was mwah. I would tell myself she was closeted, and that she did love me because how could we be so close if she didn’t and a plethora of other lies.

 After two years of our friendship, I started coming out to my other friends about my feelings for Candice. At first I did not come out as a lesbian but as “being in love with candice for who she is” It did not take long for me to realise it was women in general and not just Candice. The fact that I had really started to understand who I was and identify as a lesbian made it extremely difficult to be around Candice and not know what she was really feeling. I had to get a definitive answer one way or another. The only way I could ever know if we would be together was to ask her if she felt for me the way I felt for her and that is exactly what I did.

Asking your straight best friend if she loves you in a full-blown lesbian way is an extremely terrifying thing to do. If she says yes it is terrifying and if she says no it is heartbreaking devastation beyond anything imaginable. What if the friendship can not survive this? What if she feels weird about it? There are so many possible outcomes and not many positive ones. But by this stage I was so tortured by my feelings that I had to know once and for all if we were ever going to have a chance.

So one night, I mustered up the courage and I sent her a text. I asked her if there was any part of her that was serious about us ever getting together eventually, the way we had joked about for so long. I think by this point Candice knew that I was in love with her and so did some of our friends. It was extremely obvious even when I was still pretending to be interested in men. I know she would never admit it but I really believe that she had known for a long time. She replied to my text saying that she loved me lots but unfortunately she needed a penis. That was that, all that angst and all that build up of she loves me, she loves me not and I finally had my answer. The answer that deep down I had known she was going to give me…but it still hurt. It hurt a lot actually. I cried the whole night because I knew it was over. I had to let her go if I ever wanted to actually be happy.

Things really do happen for a reason because about a month later I got on a lesbian dating app and met my first real girlfriend who was actually a lesbian. That’s a story for another time but the point is I would never have been looking elsewhere had I not got my answer from Candice. Sometimes the only way to truly let someone go is to get an answer you didn’t want to hear.

Our friendship was definitely rocked by my admission of love and it took a few months to get back to normal. But it did. It went back to normal and we stayed as close as we had been previously. As the years went on and we both moved into more serious relationships we don’t see each other every weekend like we used too and we certainly don’t talk on the phone every day but we are still great mates. She got engaged last year and she rang me to let me know. I would be lying if I didn’t feel a fleeting pain in the heart at that news but it was gone as quickly as it came. She will always be the first woman that I ever loved even if we were never a real couple. She was the catalyst for my coming out and for that I think she will always have a special place in my heart.

The moral of the story is this, if she tells you that she is straight, believe her. But don’t be afraid to ask the question if you are unsure. A true friend will tell you the truth and you should be able to accept it and move on. Our friendship has changed a lot since the early years but I would never take any of it back. I will always look back fondly on that time in my life and I thank my lucky stars that the experience led me to meeting the amazing girlfriend I have now.