How to Tell a Friend You Have Feelings for Her

If you’ve developed feelings for one of your female friends, then you are not alone. At one point or another, every man has gone down this same path, and while your situation seems extremely complicated and uncomfortable, every man has found his way through this ordeal.

Once you realize you’ve developed feelings for one of your female friends, you have to tell her immediately. To keep your feelings to yourself and pretend you want nothing more than her friendship is dishonest to both your friend and yourself.

But before you express your feelings, you must take an important first step towards clarifying what’s really going on inside your heart.

Before you tell your friend how you feel about her, you need to first determine whether those feelings are real or not. It’s absolutely possible to develop deep, abiding and legitimate feelings for one of your friends. Yet, when most men believe they’ve fallen for one of their friends, their feelings are born of something other than a true love connection.

Consider this important point — men rarely develop feelings for their female friends when their existing love life satisfies them. If you are consistently meeting and dating women whose company you enjoy, if you are currently in a positive relationship, or if you are simply fulfilled with your dating life as it is, then the feelings you’ve discovered or developed for your friend are likely coming from a legitimate place.

Yet, if you don’t find your existing dating life satisfying, if you haven’t met or connected with any other women for months or years, if your romantic life can be described as “barren at best,” then your feelings for your female friend may be related more to your personal feelings of scarcity than to the connection the two of you share.

If your female friend is the closest thing you’ve had to a girlfriend in a long time, then you need to question whether she’s really the one for you, or if you’re unconsciously using her to fill a natural yearning best tackled through other avenues.

If you determine your feelings for your friend have nothing to do with her and everything to do with your own loneliness, then for the sake of your friendship, you need to make every effort to start meeting and dating other women.

If you determine your feelings are legitimate, then the only honest step you can take is to explain to your friend how you feel about her. You need to tell her how long you’ve known you felt this way so she knows you haven’t been hiding your true intentions, and you need to let her know that, one way or another, you can’t allow your relationship to remain the same.

Whether you begin to explore a romantic relationship with your friend, or whether you have to walk away from your friendship, depends on whether or not she shares your feelings. But no matter what happens, walk confident in the knowledge you acted honestly and for the greater good of everyone involved.