You and this woman are really good friends. You can talk for hours, have fun, and do the coolest things together. But that’s exactly where the problem actually begins: you’ve fallen (unhappily?) in love with your best friend.
You think about her constantly. Every WhatsApp message and every meeting with her makes your heart race with joy. She is your absolute dream partner for life, your soul mate.
At the same time, this love hurts like a hundred pinpricks and leaves you completely perplexed. Perhaps even sleepless.
A thousand questions are going through your head right now:
“Should I finally tell her? Confess my feelings and risk our friendship? Or should I try to win her over by flirting? What if she rejects me, which will destroy all my hopes? Can we even remain friends like this, or do I have to cut off contact?”
In love with best friend: Should you risk the friendship or not?
I know you’re totally in love and experiencing an emotional rollercoaster. But in this difficult situation, you can’t act rashly. Don’t let yourself be carried away by a rash action that you might later regret!
Instead of confessing your love to your best friend straight away or doing other stupid things, you should first consider a few important things.
Strictly speaking, you now have these 3 options:
- Acceptance: You may hide your feelings, let your friendship continue as before, and hope that the infatuation will soon fade (which is unlikely).
- Change: You try to win the person over . If your plan goes wrong, you risk the end of your friendly relationship.
- Leave: You end or minimize contact for the time being if she doesn’t want a relationship with you and her closeness torments you too much (especially if jealousy sets in as soon as she meets other men).
But what should you do as her best friend? If you answer the following five questions, you should get closer to deciding how to behave towards the woman:
1. Do you love her or is it just a crush?
Ask yourself whether you’re truly in love with your best friend or not. Yes, emotions can play tricks on us men. Sometimes we just imagine love or at least overestimate the feeling. There can be several reasons for this:
- You generally long for a relationship, sex, and affection in life because you ‘re completely starved of it as a permanent single . You now transfer this need to your good friend.
- You lack choice because you hardly meet any women in your everyday life. This causes you to cling to your only option – and you don’t experience that other girls might be a much better match for you. This psychological phenomenon is also called “oneitis . “
- She’s visually very attractive, which makes your hormones go crazy (especially since you once saw her all dressed up in a skimpy outfit).
- She wants to spend a lot of time with you, is completely open with you, and confides her most intimate secrets in you. This behavior flatters you greatly—particularly because you’ve never experienced anything like this with women before.
- It’s the appeal of the unattainable when she already has a steady boyfriend.
So before you pull any fateful levers that could end your friendship, you should first examine how deep your love truly is. Does your heart burn with lasting passion, or is it just a fickle flash in the pan?
2. Is a relationship between you realistic?
Sure, things are going great between you on a friendly level. But that doesn’t mean you’re a good match as a couple. A relationship requires a lot more than that—things that don’t matter between friends.
Take off your rose-colored glasses for a moment and look at the situation soberly!
There may be some factors that make a happy partnership unrealistic:
- You sometimes have opposing values, lifestyles and plans for the future (classic examples such as: one wants to have children later, the other doesn’t; different temperaments, which don’t mesh well in everyday life, etc.).
- Your good friend is into a completely different type of man, is just getting to know someone while dating, or is even already happily engaged to Mr. Right.
So think about which type of woman suits you and whether she falls into this category!
Ask yourself: Could you happily live together in the same apartment for the long term, seeing each other every day, or would things quickly escalate between you? Maybe it’s better to just meet once or twice a week as friends.
3. Does the woman perhaps have feelings for you too?
How does she feel about you? Maybe you’re lucky and your best friend is also in love with you , or at least fancies you . That would, of course, make it easier to turn your friendship into love and win her over.
Typical signs of being in love or erotic interest include:
- During conversations, the other person maintains eye contact with you for an unusually long time and smiles at you dreamily.
- She gives you sexual compliments, teases you playfully, and flirts with you.
- There is more touching between you than is usual between friends (things like holding hands or her hand on your knee).
- She reacts jealously to your contact with other women.
- She makes joking suggestions about what it would be like if you lived together as partners (for example, she asks with a laugh whether you both buy a dog together).
- Instead of meeting you without makeup and in a sloppy look, she dresses up for you because she wants to please you.
- In groups, she’s completely focused on you. She also treats you differently than other men she’s good friends with.
Such signs are all the more significant if she already has a steady boyfriend .
But beware of seemingly positive signals like constant WhatsApp contact, deep conversations, and her constantly asking you for help. In fact, these are often signs of the friend zone !
4. How “valuable” is your friendship really?
Time and again, I hear from men in love how important their friendship with a good girlfriend is to them. This buddy-like relationship seems almost to be the “most sacred” thing in life.
But is that really true? Maybe you’ve just sugarcoated the situation because you feel love, were manipulated, and are therefore wearing rose-colored glasses.
In truth, friendships between men and women are often very one-sided when he is in love with his girlfriend: As a nice guy, he listens to her problems for hours, helps her with every task, no matter how trivial, and allows himself to be exploited for many other things.
Sure, the woman benefits from it. Perhaps that’s why you’re so “important” to her as a “best friend”…
So consider whether your relationship is really healthy or rather toxic and based on emotional dependencies.
My tip: Just compare the whole thing with your good male friendships and see if you get (at least) what your friends give you from your chosen one! Also, ask yourself whether you consider your male friends just as indispensable, or whether you’re less clingy.
5. Are you willing to risk your friendship?
Anyone who’s in love with their best friend, like you are, is in a real bind: On the one hand, you don’t want to jeopardize your precious friendship. On the other hand, the current situation makes you very unhappy because you love this woman and want more.
In my opinion, you have little to lose. You should take the risk of approaching her, provided she’s single and you have a realistic chance with her.
There are three key reasons for this:
Firstly, maybe your friendship is not as good and valuable as you previously believed (see above).
Second, if you love her, you can’t be friends anyway. That’s neither honest nor emotionally healthy for either of you. In truth, your friendship was already starting to crumble when you first developed feelings for her. So you don’t have much left to lose.
Third, you’ll regret inaction later. If she rejects you, at least you tried—and you have the certainty. Together, you can then decide whether to stay friends or go your separate ways.
In love with your best friend: the 2 biggest no-go’s
Let’s say you want to take the next step and convince the woman of your dreams to consider a relationship. But how do you go about it without ruining everything? First, avoid these two mistakes if you’re in love with a good friend:
Mistake 1: Confessing (or hinting at) your love
Online advice books often advise men who are secretly in love to have a frank conversation with their girlfriend and confess their love. Please don’t do that if you want to have a chance with her! Neither in writing via WhatsApp or a love letter, nor verbally at the next meeting!
A declaration of love would be honest, but still completely wrong:
- First , you’d completely take the woman by surprise and throw her off track. Especially if she has no idea about your feelings, doesn’t feel anything for you, and truly believes you two are just good friends.
- Secondly, she won’t fall in love with you through words of encouragement, but through actions—that is, the skillful game of seduction when flirting. The motto is: emotion over information!
- Third, your partner feels cornered by a declaration of love. You’re literally putting a gun to her head, forcing her to decide whether or not to be in a relationship with you.
Confessing your love is a very clumsy move. It will only cause her to distance herself from you in fear—like a frog jumping off a hot stove.
Mistake 2: Just kissing her on the next date
It’s also not a good idea to surprise the other person with a kiss if you’re in love with their best friend. This behavior would be just as surprising as a declaration of love and also very sexually intrusive.
Instead of going from zero to one hundred with kisses straight away, you need to approach your beloved slowly while flirting and carefully establish physical contact first.
You’ll find out how this works right away…
5 tips to win over your best friend
If you want to win this woman over for a relationship, you have to get out of the friend zone as quickly as possible . This means you can’t send any more signals about friendship, but instead you have to subliminally (!) signal to her that you want more.
But how can you make your best friend fall in love without having to pour a magic potion over her pizza at the next movie night?
In my experience, the following 5 tips help to trigger butterflies in your stomach:
1. It’s best to meet her alone!
However, group meetings should now be a thing of the past—or at least reduced. How do you expect to approach the lady undisturbed to initiate a relationship when your friends are there? Therefore, try to meet her alone in the future.
You will see that such meetings for two have much more of a date character than being together in a pack.
2. Turn boring meetings into exciting dates!
This doesn’t mean you should organize a romantic candlelight dinner at an Italian restaurant. That would communicate your intentions far too obviously.
But if you just sit at home with your girlfriend in front of the TV or do other boring things with her, she won’t develop any real feelings. Women fall in love with adventurous men with whom they can share exciting experiences.
So become an attractive alpha male and suggest activities together that the woman will fondly remember later!
This could be, for example, a visit to an amusement park, a weekend trip to another city or a bike tour with a romantic castle tour.
Another cool tip: During wobbly activities like ice skating, skateboarding or inline skating, it’s very easy to establish physical contact by holding on to each other to avoid falling.
In my other blog articles you will find many more creative date ideas , including ones for little money .
3. Stop playing the nice listener and helper!
If you’re in love with your best friend, you’re happy to sacrifice yourself for her. You’d give the shirt off your back to make her happy.
But as you may have already noticed, a woman won’t fall in love if you do everything for her. Quite the opposite: This nice-guy behavior will only make her label you as a good friend who’s weak and unmanly because he lets himself be exploited too much.
From now on, you should learn to say “no” when she asks you to assemble her furniture, fix her computer, or pick her up from the airport at night.
In a friendship, it’s also not your job to spend hours listening to her problems and man stories. It drives you crazy anyway when you imagine her dating and having sex with other guys, right?
4. Keep your distance to appear interesting!
It’s not for nothing that there are sayings when flirting like “Make yourself scarce, be her star!” This sentence also applies if you are in love with a good friend.
If you’ve been her best friend, available around the clock and responding to every WhatsApp message within minutes, then you should urgently change that behavior starting today!
It’s okay to go a day without responding and to make yourself scarce . Don’t always have time for her right away! As a busy man, you’ll seem much more interesting – and maybe your girlfriend will soon start to miss you.
Positive side effect: If she doesn’t want a relationship with you, you can use the distance to process the heartbreak (see below!).
5. Start flirting with her properly!
Have you been a rather boring guy who only talks about serious topics and communicates matter-of-factly? Then you should start making the woman laugh to trigger more emotions in her! Of course, that’s not enough to seduce her.
In another article, I’ve already explained how to flirt properly . Here are a few quick tips and sayings to give you a taste:
- Compliments: “Wow, you look really attractive in that dress. If we weren’t just friends, I’d say you were trying to drive me crazy with it!”
- Joking rejections: “Hey, why are you looking at me so lovingly? You know, we’re just friends…”
- Playful teasing : “I must say, you’re really good at cooking spaghetti. You get a C for that!” / “Whaaaat, you actually like this show? I think I need to file for divorce.”
- Touching: Share a wool blanket on the couch during movie night. At some point, take her hand and see how she reacts. You can also try holding hands while taking a walk.
- Fun things to do: Start a pillow fight at home if you’ve been too good and boring as a man. Or play harmless pranks on her, like hiding her slippers while she goes to the bathroom.
- Offer a massage: “You look totally tense. I’ll give you a soothing neck massage…”
In summary: Be a little cheeky and humorous. But always pay attention to your partner’s reactions when flirting! If she doesn’t reciprocate your advances, blocks them, and feels uncomfortable, that’s a clear stop signal. Then you should respect her boundaries and stop your flirting offensive.
In love with your best friend, but not her – what to do?
Are you unhappily in love with your best friend because, as it turns out, she only wants friendship instead of a relationship? In that case, you have to accept her wishes, let go internally, and fall out of love. As bitter as it may be.
Don’t keep trying to play best friend to win her over!
That would be neither honest nor productive. Because once you’re really deep in the friend zone with women and they simply don’t have feelings for you, it’s almost impossible to change her mind. I can tell you that from my own experience.
Instead, you should reorient yourself in life and take the following steps:
First, keep your distance or break off contact
Being close to this woman is pure poison for your soul and only fuels your heartbreak. It becomes especially unbearable when jealousy comes into play because she tells you at length about her dates with men, has sex with another guy, or suddenly gets a steady boyfriend.
So don’t torture yourself any longer and don’t destroy yourself!
If you’re unhappily in love with your best friend, you need to distance yourself for a while to calmly process your heartbreak. By consistently breaking up with her, your friendship may still be salvaged.
This means complete radio silence for several weeks or even months. During this time, you are not allowed to meet her in person, text her, or call her!
If this step is too radical for you and you’re not that deeply in love, it might be enough to keep contact to a minimum by texting each other once or twice a week.
But what if, after a break in contact, you realize that you can no longer be friends with her normally because you still love her? In that case, you should go a step further and actually end the contact.
Announce your break in contact in advance
It’s best to talk to your girlfriend before you back off, rather than hurting her by suddenly ghosting her. Simply disappearing like that wouldn’t be fair to her.
Explain the situation to her, why you need some time alone and will be keeping your distance for now. Avoid accusing her. Tell her that she hasn’t done anything wrong, so as not to make her feel guilty or start an argument.
You can also announce that you would like to continue or rebuild your friendship after the break (if it is true).
Distract yourself with activities and friends
Of course, if you ‘re unhappily in love with your best friend, the pain won’t be easy to get over. The wounds take time to heal when you feel so strongly about the other person.
You should therefore use your break from contact to distract yourself with other things in your everyday life and get rid of your feelings for her. You now need to process your heartbreak .
Engage in hobbies and activities that make you feel good. Exercise, for example, can help you release your frustration, and traveling to new places can help clear your mind. Books and films about heartbreak might also help.
Or how about a weekend trip to another city or hiking with friends? During your trip, you can talk about your painful situation—that helps.
Meet new women who like you
In my experience, this is by far the most effective and fastest way if you want to get rid of your feelings for your best friend: You have to meet new women in everyday life and get dates regularly.
This can completely change your thinking. You’ll see that there are other interesting girls out there who might be an even better match for you in terms of a relationship.
In the end, you might even come to the realization that your good friend was never really your dream partner, that you simply put her on a pedestal and unnecessarily got carried away with your crush.
