Story time: I’m in love with one of my closest friends... it’s complicated

Ok this story spans over a few years and relationships and even countries. I’m going to condense it as best I can because in the past few days, some things have happened that I never would’ve imagined.

I’d known who he was (let’s call him J) since middle school but we didn’t become friends til after grade 10. We knew each other through church and at summer camp that year, he started hanging out with me and my friends. Then I started to look at him differently. After camp, J got my number from my friend and we started texting every day. My friends invited him to our beach trip and he became one of my best friends. Everyone would always come up to me and ask “are you dating” but even after months of texting all the time he’d still never said anything and I was scared.

In November that year, my “friend” asked out this other guy that she knew I’d liked before and i got angry because she’d known that and didn’t even ask me beforehand. I think i confused this anger for still liking previous guy and so i stopped responding to J’s texts but we remained friends whenever we saw each other on Sundays and Wednesday’s. I actually realized in December I DID like him. I texted him and started up a convo, but I didn’t tell him how I felt, and it didn’t do anything.

Fast forward to February I’m the last of our friends to find out he got a girlfriend. My heart broke, I went home and cried my heart out. It was this girl he’d literally known since forever and their families were friends and I had no hope they would ever break up. She didn’t go to our church though, so things remained fairly the same.

Sometimes J would do stuff that made me question his feelings. He accidentally told me he loved me over text, he would very often say things that seemed like he was trying to make me jealous etc. How could I move on? I couldn’t tell him because I felt like it wasn’t fair to him or his girlfriend.

A year later, last year of high school, I’m still in love he’s still in a relationship. I tell him I’ve decided to move out of the country for university and he says that it sucks and he’ll miss me. I ask about his college plans which i knew his first choice but he was instead thinking of going to someplace he didn’t even like just to be with his girlfriend. I got angry at him saying he should make that decision for himself and he was insistent that this was better. We forget the argument ever happened, and honestly don’t really talk to each other much for a few months.

Somehow we get back to being friends again, we hang out a few times with our friends in the summer, I have a going away party and then I move out of the country, he stays fairly local. His gf followed him to his college and they start attending the same place. I wanted to stay in touch and I tried to text him and it was good for a day but then he starts acting all weird and so I stopped trying.

I go home to visit for the winter break and we see each other again and I feel more in love with him than before for some reason. I go back out of the country and go on some bad dates to try and get over him, bad enough to consider myself okay without anyone including J. We don’t keep in touch during that second semester of university.

I make it known to my friends I’ll be back for two months in the summer, and so we organize times to hang out. My friends have always wanted the two of us together and they’re like wing people always putting us together and stuff. During the hangouts they make sure this happens, make sure he’s the one giving me rides, that he’s the first to arrive and we time alone together etc.

After this I feel closer to him again and I’m content with our friendship. I go back out of the country again, and suddenly he texts me when he’s bored. I don’t think much of it, he talked about staying at his girlfriends house for a few days, it’s the end of June this year and nothing has changed.

I start working and a few weeks later he texts me asking how my job is. Usually over the years, he’d be awkward and distant when texting except for when we first started talking 3 years ago. This conversation keeps going. He’s invested for once, and soon we begin to text every single day.

His girlfriend is apparently in Tokyo and so I figure he’ll stop texting me when she returns, but he doesn’t. I was confused but didn’t think anything of it. He tells me his cousin is getting married nearby next summer and starts planning a whole trip to see me here and I’m shocked and excited, I really want it to happen.

Then last week he said he needed to tell me something. He told me he was working on improving himself. He broke up with his girlfriend, it was mutual but he also felt like he couldn’t improve himself focused on someone else. He told me they broke up at the end of June. I was sitting there shocked because it’s August and we were talking all of July. He continues and says he has a problem with loneliness, and whether it’s a SO or someone else, he needed others to feel good about himself. He then told me that since the break up he relied on me and needed me to feel valuable, and he loved talking to me. But that he needed to distance himself from me. He said he’d been depressed all day because he needed to tell me he couldn’t talk to me as much if he was going to learn to be alone. He still wanted to keep in touch, but he just figured he should take time to himself.

A week went by and then yesterday he texts me at 3am, sending me 79 messages about everything that went on the days we didn’t talk 😂 i thought he’d take a lot longer to himself but i guess not. So we start talking again I suppose. Today we talked for 7 hours straight.

ANYWAYS. I’m so in love with him. There’s a part of me that wishes that once he’s okay with who he is alone, he’ll come to me. He just got out of the relationship two months ago. But I also know that I can’t always be waiting around for him. Yet I’ve always felt like he was really my soulmate.