Auntie SparkNotes: I Feel Terrible About Crushing on My BF’s Friend

Dear Auntie,

I’ve been feeling really guilty lately. I’ve been dating a guy for four years and we are both in our twenties. We’ve lived together for two years and I would say we are in a pretty committed relationship. He is wonderful, kind, good-looking, etc. We get along and relate to each other really well. But I have an ugly problem. I have a crush on one of his friends.

At first, I thought it was just me noticing another cute guy, and it would pass with time. But I have been feeling this way for over a year now! I don’t see this guy very often (just once every couple of months) and I have never hung out with him without my boyfriend. I try to remain distant from him. Usually my feelings fade out, but then we’ll all hang out and the crush pops up all over again.

I don’t know why my feelings won’t go away. I haven’t ever been so attracted to someone else while in a relationship. I have never stopped loving my boyfriend and I want to be with him, but this other guy is handsome and smart and just really cool. I daydream about cheating on my boyfriend with him and then later hate myself for thinking those things. I would never want to hurt my boyfriend or betray his trust.

I guess I want to know if you think those feelings are a sign that my relationship isn’t fully satisfying me? I almost feel polyamorous at times, but my boyfriend would definitely not be okay with having an open or polyamorous relationship. I just don’t know. Please help.

For starters, Sparkler, let’s just get this out of the way: If being attracted to other people while coupled-up meant that something was wrong with your relationship or that you weren’t cut out for monogamy, then every romance in the entirety of human history would be in serious freakin’ trouble. Even in a committed relationship with someone you really love, you still have eyeballs and a brain and a heart that are doing their job to process the world around you—and that includes taking notice when a super-fine specimen of your preferred kind of human wanders across your path. The fact that you’ve developed a superficial crush on your boyfriend’s smart, handsome, cool friend doesn’t say a ding-dang thing about you, except that you’re a human being. (You know, in case you weren’t sure about that.)

Meanwhile, the reason why your feelings won’t go away is probably more like two reasons, as follows: First, there’s the part where you’re treating this attraction like a shameful secret sign of imminent romantic doom, rather than a normal, natural part of the human experience—which scientifically and psychologically speaking makes you about a million times more likely to keep noticing and obsessing over it. And second, there’s the part where you are running into this guy just often enough to notice and appreciate his crushworthy qualities, but nowhere near often enough to have your feelings be torpedoed by the cold, harsh reality of his actual personhood… which is actually yet another sign that this crush is nothing to worry about. It’s true that liking someone else when you’re coupled up can be a sign of something lacking in your relationship, but in this case, there is no “something” between you and the guy in question. Your crush isn’t based on a concrete connection that satisfies some unfulfilled need on your part; it’s the kind of fantasy that only a total lack of intimate knowledge can sustain. And if you got closer, my guess is that the fantasy would deflate significantly, if not completely. This guy might be cool, smart, and handsome, but let’s be real: he also blows his nose on his socks and listens to bad music and picks his nose at stoplights just like anyone else.

Which is why I’d like to suggest an alternative approach to getting past your feelings: to stop fighting them quite so hard. For one thing, the way you’re trying to white-knuckle your attraction out of existence is only adding fuel to the fire, in the form of turning it from a harmless, intermittent distraction into the ne plus ultra of naughty forbidden badthink. The taboo you’ve attached to every thought of this guy is making him more alluring, not less. But for another thing, it’s ridiculous for you to be flagellating yourself like this when you haven’t done a damn thing that you should feel guilty about. Your daydreams about your boyfriend’s friend are not wrong in and of themselves; within the safe confines of your head, they’re as harmless and imaginary as any other fantasy.

And the fact is, even if you’re healthily and happily monogamous with no interest whatsoever in cheating, those fantasies are a part of life. Your brain is still going to sometimes go off the rails with sexy-romantic ideas about other people, for no other reason than that it makes the inside of your head a more exciting place to be. And your job is not to squash those ideas as fast as they crop up because they represent an existential threat to your relationship (which they don’t), but to recognize if they cross the line between enjoyable but meaningless fantasy and a specific, concrete yearning for something you’re not getting in your current relationship… and to trust yourself to know the difference.

Got something to say? Tell us in the comments! And to get advice from Auntie, email her at advice@sparknotes.com.
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