Let me start by saying I'm not actually polyamorous myself. I've been dealing with some shit lately and I spoke with a therapist who advised me to talk about it on a polyamorous site, so I'm giving this a shot, hopefully someone on here can give me some helpful advice. My orientation is...get ready, this is a mouthful...grey-asexual panromantic. For anyone who doesn't know, asexual means I'm not sexually attracted to any gender, grey means I experience extremely rare exceptions to my asexuality, and panromantic means I'm romantically attracted to all genders. So that's the end of my little disclaimer, on to my problem.
I fell in love with my best friend. We've always been extremely close, but about a year ago I realized I was beginning to care for her as more than just a friend. Time passed, feelings grew, by now I'm completely helplessly head over heels can't stop thinking about you in love. And remember that little grey in my orientation I mentioned? She's the grey. The only person in 20 years I have actually felt sexual desire towards.
So for a year I wrestled constantly with my feelings. Should I tell her? Would it make things weird between us? What if she doesn't like me back? What if she does but I'll never know because I'm too scared to tell her? In the meantime she developed a crush on a guy we know, and I became even more scared to reveal my feelings. Knowing the way she acted when she talked about him or thought about him, I decided there was no way she could ever feel that way about me. I had finally decided to just give up, never tell her, and deal with my feelings as best as I could in silence. Then we got drunk. Things happened. Really fucking awesome things. Best night of my life things. I started getting my hopes up again. But the morning after she told me she wanted us to consider that night a "drunken accident". And she started dating the guy she was crushing on a few days later. That's all fine, I don't want to push anything on her, I care about our friendship above everything else including my other feelings for her and the last thing I want is to hurt the relationship we have. But even so, I find myself horrendously jealous of this guy. Really bad. It doesn't help that she loves to talk about how wonderful and perfect he is, and how great their sex is, and how she's soooo happy that she's with him. I feel morally torn. I want to be happy for her, I want her to be happy, I want to be a good supportive friend, but any time she mentions him I just feel this sickening black soup of pain and envy and resentment in my guts, and then I feel incredibly guilty and disgusted with myself for feeling that way.
I want to move on, but it's so hard to imagine I could ever possibly feel this way for anyone else. That's why my orientation is important to this discussion, because for 20 years I couldn't care less about romance or relationships or sex or any of that with anyone. I'm an adult now, and I'm feeling all of these things for the very first time, and I can't believe how strong they are, and I feel like everyone else my age has been dealing with these sorts of feelings for so long they know how to deal with them while I'm like a lost scared child in an unknown environment.
So what this all boils down to is that I need help learning how to deal with all of these things. Love, jealousy, moving on. And I don't even know where to start. Help?
I fell in love with my best friend. We've always been extremely close, but about a year ago I realized I was beginning to care for her as more than just a friend. Time passed, feelings grew, by now I'm completely helplessly head over heels can't stop thinking about you in love. And remember that little grey in my orientation I mentioned? She's the grey. The only person in 20 years I have actually felt sexual desire towards.
So for a year I wrestled constantly with my feelings. Should I tell her? Would it make things weird between us? What if she doesn't like me back? What if she does but I'll never know because I'm too scared to tell her? In the meantime she developed a crush on a guy we know, and I became even more scared to reveal my feelings. Knowing the way she acted when she talked about him or thought about him, I decided there was no way she could ever feel that way about me. I had finally decided to just give up, never tell her, and deal with my feelings as best as I could in silence. Then we got drunk. Things happened. Really fucking awesome things. Best night of my life things. I started getting my hopes up again. But the morning after she told me she wanted us to consider that night a "drunken accident". And she started dating the guy she was crushing on a few days later. That's all fine, I don't want to push anything on her, I care about our friendship above everything else including my other feelings for her and the last thing I want is to hurt the relationship we have. But even so, I find myself horrendously jealous of this guy. Really bad. It doesn't help that she loves to talk about how wonderful and perfect he is, and how great their sex is, and how she's soooo happy that she's with him. I feel morally torn. I want to be happy for her, I want her to be happy, I want to be a good supportive friend, but any time she mentions him I just feel this sickening black soup of pain and envy and resentment in my guts, and then I feel incredibly guilty and disgusted with myself for feeling that way.
I want to move on, but it's so hard to imagine I could ever possibly feel this way for anyone else. That's why my orientation is important to this discussion, because for 20 years I couldn't care less about romance or relationships or sex or any of that with anyone. I'm an adult now, and I'm feeling all of these things for the very first time, and I can't believe how strong they are, and I feel like everyone else my age has been dealing with these sorts of feelings for so long they know how to deal with them while I'm like a lost scared child in an unknown environment.
So what this all boils down to is that I need help learning how to deal with all of these things. Love, jealousy, moving on. And I don't even know where to start. Help?