Crush on friend is making me neurotic

[jnr587]

Oh the tangled webs we weave. Any insight to my likely overblown situation is greatly appreciated!

 

I am a 30-year-old man that has developed an unwelcome crush on a new friend. To preface, I am closeted bisexual man with a wonderful, but long-distance, girlfriend who I care for very much. Jake (as we will call him) and I met a few months ago through work. He is an underling of mine (4 years my junior) and we are both fairly new to town so neither of us have many good guy friends (he has a girlfriend). His job has been temporary all along and he will be moving away in December (although his girlfriend will still be in my town). We worked closely together on a few work projects and really hit it off. I think he was excited by the prospect of a new friendship and he pursued this friendship fairly aggressively- constantly inviting me to hang out, etc. I have always been quite careful at work so even though I wanted a friend, blowing off steam with an underling is something I tend to avoid. I ultimately took him up on his offer a few times and ended up having so much fun with him- I just hadn't clicked with a new guy friend in so many years. His friendship was a breath of fresh air. We have become pretty close friends over the last few months - I guess this is what people call a bromance. He seems to fight with his girlfriend often and my girlfriend is away and is often busy with work so our friendship became a nice outlet. He respects me at work as a superior and our work relationship hasn't changed. We trust each other quite a bit and personal information I have shared with him and antics we have embarked on (drinking escapades) have made me a little concerned that I am compromising my professionalism although I do maintain the trust I have developed with him. The problem is that I recently realized that I have developed fairly strong feelings for him (finding him attractive, thinking about him all the time, wanting to hang out as much as possible). I am nearly 100% sure he has no homosexual or bisexual tendencies.

 

Last weekend (10 days ago) we made plans and basically spent the entire weekend together and had, what I thought, was a great time. Since then though, we've hardly hung out at all. We've both been busy and on different projects, but has declined a few of my offers to hang out over the past week. Often he is the one instigating activities. We talk via text a lot and our conversations are no different there, and he isn't really complaining about his girlfriend, so I don't know if things are just better there for right now and he wants to spend time with her. Basically, I think everything is probably fine but I hate that I've allowed myself to get so neurotic about this. I don't want him to know about my feelings for plenty of reasons (work-related and also I think it would compromise our friendship). Likewise, I don't want to bring this up to him as I'm likely making something out of nothing and I strongly believe that creating this sort of drama is totally inappropriate. He declined to hang out again tonight and I almost lost it.

 

What's making this so much worse is I hate myself for what I'm doing to my girlfriend. I have had man-friend crushes before but never when I was in an actual relationship. I actually spent this past weekend with her, had such a great time, didn't really talk to Jake and I blocked him out of my mind fairly successfully. But now that I'm back in my town with him as my primary emotional outlet, I feel like I'm falling apart. I don't want to ruin things with her over a stupid unattainable crush, but I can't help but feel unfaithful. I haven't been in many relationships before but I think she is something special. We have been together for almost a year and I've thought she may be the girl I marry. I suppose I still think that to some degree.

 

I don't want to block him out of my life because, even though he's leaving in a few more months, he's grown dear to me and (I think) I have grown dear to him.

 

Any thoughts?

[KathyM]

I'm all for honesty in relationships. I think people deserve honesty. I think you should be honest with your girlfriend about your bisexuality. She needs to know. That would be the first step. I also think you should cut out the friendship with this guy friend, since he is in a relationship with someone else, as are you, and therefore, your relationship with him is not in the best interests of your relationship with your girlfriend.

[jnr587]

Thank you! I have not told her but I've been thinking about it for a while. I think I will once this blows over.

 

Simply catering to the voices in my head that tell me to do things that I probably shouldn't, does anybody think it could be possible that jake likes me back? I always think of the Kinsey scale but it seems to me that most people are exclusively heterosexual. Has anyone found out a generally straight friend had latent bisexual tendencies?

[jacksonvillae]

I do not think she will be a very good influence in your life. Stay away from her as soon as you can. What would be the next thing she could do. Does her parents know about her escapades? If not I think you should tell them because you were once bestfriends. About your crush sleeping with her, you can always find decent guys and those are not decent enough because if they were they will not sleep with your bestfriend because they just took advantage of her.