Real life: I am in love with my best friend

Bo (31) has been together with Gregory (36) for eight years. Only for a few months now, she hardly sleeps anymore. She has unexpectedly fallen in love with her best friend Noor. 

‘Just say it. The difference between ‘a friend’ and your best friend. I think you grow up with a best friend. Noor and I have known each other for fourteen years. We smoked our first cigarette together behind the electricity shed. Made our first ‘outing’ on the bus to the city and bought our first bra there: hers pink, mine mint green. We even did two ‘chicken fillets’ over each other during the school party. Everything to fake bigger breasts.

We studied together. She studied law, I studied Dutch. We studied together one more time. She studied tourism, I studied communication. She stood at my door with a bottle of wine when I passed and she didn’t. I called her crying when my boyfriend ran off with someone else. She called me feeling guilty when she had kissed someone else during carnival and felt intense regret towards her boyfriend and didn’t dare to tell him.

She held my hair out of my face when I went over my neck during my first XTC experience (bad idea) at that festival. Just say it, the difference between ‘a friend’ and your best friend. Your best friend is just there, yes, always for you. Accepts your pure self as you are. Doesn’t judge. Noor knows me better than my partner. Better than my mother. Sometimes I think she knows me better than I know myself. I tell her everything.

But I can’t tell her this for the first time. If I tell her this, I put our friendship at stake. For about a few months now, it feels different. It started during that 2020 (this is going to be a ‘top year’, well, ahem) New Year’s party, where we ended up in a spontaneous fun kiss, just like friends sometimes do. We never did that, this was a joke. The next day we laughed about it. The weeks after that, I felt strange. I looked at her Instagram more often and noticed that I felt happier when she called me.

For the record: I have been attracted to men for as long as I can remember. I have never felt anything for women. But since that one day, I look at her differently. I look longer into her eyes. I feel happy when I get a message from her and I sometimes daydream about another kiss at a New Year’s party.

When she sent me photos of a red birthday outfit, I felt it happen spontaneously. I blushed. Didn’t know what was happening to me. When she then called me enthusiastically about a guy she had only met a few times but who ‘could absolutely be the one, Bo, really!’ I sensed a twinge of jealousy within myself. And I was shocked by that too.

Then you’re 31 and suddenly dealing with a spontaneous identity crisis. Am I bisexual? The feeling confuses me and the two people I would normally discuss this with are my boyfriend and best friend. Besides: I don’t even know what this feeling really is.

What should I do with this? Does my friend have the right to know this? I can hardly look her in the eye, I feel so in love in her presence. There’s a good chance it will scare her, just like Greg. Which I completely understand. Somewhere I secretly hope that the feeling fades away, so everything can just go back to the way it was. But deep down I feel that something in me is changing. And I’m afraid that those repressed feelings will eventually have to come out. To be honest: I’m terrified of losing everything. So I stay silent. Until it really can’t go on anymore.’

In this unusual time, we asked people for their honest story. To avoid hurting others, the names of Bo, Noor, and Gregory have been changed.