TIFU by chasing a feeling.

I am still coming to terms with the outcome of this situation. I think I just need a place to vent about it all without shame, though I think it will come out sounding a little juvenile.

This whole thing starts when my online friend and I joined a discord server together in the hopes of making some new friends. This discord had a modded Minecraft server with an active community, and we both thought we'd join and play and have some fun. My friend got to the server first and got started playing Minecraft and meeting the people we'd be playing with. She told me pretty early on that she had found this guy on the server that she wanted to flirt with simply as something fun to do, and to get resources off him in the game. Frankly, I'm not a fan of this kind of behavior as I think people can get their feelings hurt pretty quickly, but she was having fun, so I wasn't going to stop her.

Flash forward to when I can finally join the server and start playing. I met the guy a couple of times. He seemed chill and we were all having fun together. At some point, however, my friend started to express something like annoyance or disinterest in the man and seemed to want to just focus on her own thing. Then, she goes offline for a few days to have a social life and all that jazz. I've got a little more time on my hands than I want to admit, so I am online playing MC nearly everyday. I ended up crossing paths with the guy a couple of times and having some interesting conversations with him that I really enjoyed. At this point, I think it's all platonic and I am not actively seeking out anything flirtatious with him. We end up chatting about music and other little things in private dms and I'm feeling good about having made a friend.

When my friend comes back online, however, she mentions to me that she thinks she's picked up a vibe between me and this guy. I honestly wasn't really seeing it that way at that point and even told her I wasn't intending to step on her toes. She told me that it really didn't matter to her, and if I wanted to, I could try and pursue this man. She didn't have feelings for him, and if I thought I was going to have fun with him, I should go have fun.

So, I ended up talking to this guy a little more often, and I started to see where things might be getting flirtatious. I asked him to clarify his intentions, as I don't want to misread anything and end up embarrassing both of us. He tells me that he was, in fact, trying to flirt, so I go for it and flirt back. It's all really nice for a while, and despite the circumstances of our meeting, the connection feels genuine. My friend even asks me to tell her about what's going on, wanting to experience the fun of it through my recounting of the events as they unfold to her. I told her about one instance where me and this guy were playing a different game together and the banter was all so cutsie, and I was maybe starting to feel a type of way about him.

Maybe a couple of hours after me telling her about this instance, she calls me on the phone to tell me that she is actually really uncomfortable with the whole situation. She explains that even though she didn't have feelings for the guy, she felt it was weird that I would flirt with someone she had been flirting with first. She asked me if I viewed her as competition, to which I said no. It really wasn’t like that for me and I genuinely believed she wouldn’t care because she told me she didn’t & she wasn’t serious about the guy in the first place.

I tried to talk it out with her, but I honestly just felt weird about the way she was explaining her discomfort with the whole situation. It seemed to me that she only became uncomfortable after I had told her that feelings were starting to be reciprocated. We ended that phone call without any real solution being made.

Here's where I fucked up. I kept talking to the guy. I knew it made her uncomfortable, though I didn't fully have a grasp on why she felt that way, but the connection I felt with this guy was honestly really good and I didn't want to just cut it off out of nowhere. She ended up texting me a couple days later and told me that how I was acting was creating a distance between the two of us, and that she had only told me to go for it because she was sacrificing her own feelings- still maintaining that she had none for the guy. She mentioned something about how she felt that even if she had asked me to, I wouldn't stop talking to this guy, and that would hurt her worse. I felt weird about this statement. I really didn't understand why she'd ask me to do that, or why she suddenly felt so strongly about my flirtationship with him. She told me she didn't want to play Minecraft with us anymore and went back offline for a while.

The guy ends up asking me if there is something going on between me and my friend, as he had noticed her absence. I explained the whole thing to him. He told me he really didn't know that my friend was flirting with him, that he didn't want to come between me and her but that he felt the same way about our connection, and hoped we'd all find a way to work it out. We even agreed that the way she was handling the situation was a tad juvenile. Not to invalidate her for feeling any type of way about it, just that we both thought she could have done a better job expressing how she felt at the appropriate time. He encouraged me to take my time to step back from her and gain a bit of perspective before trying to talk with her again, and that’s what I did.

Eventually, I worked up the nerve to ask if I could have a conversation with my friend in the hopes of understanding where she was coming from and explaining how I felt about it all. We talked on the phone. I asked her to explain where I was going wrong, and she told me the same thing she said before; that it’s weird to flirt with a guy your friend was flirting with first. She even flipped it on me, bringing up past examples of my failed attempts at romance that I had told her about, and how if she had tried to flirt with any of those guys after things didn't work out for me, I'd feel the way she did. I wanted to tell her that where those examples differ from what was happening now is that I had genuine feelings for those people and she did not have feelings for this guy she met in Minecraft. I also wanted to tell her that it felt icky of her to have told me to go for it, and then only once my feelings were involved, tell me to stop because now it makes her upset. Regardless, I couldn't get the words out, nor would she really let me. She went on about how weird I was being and ended up saying she didn't want me as a friend anymore.

After that, everything started spiraling. She removed me as a friend on everything. She left the discord server, and I assume people asked her why and she explained her side. People started avoiding me. I would get on the game only for no one to want to interact with me or even acknowledge my presence. I ended up leaving the server as well.

Eventually, the guy ended up telling me that regardless of how he felt about me, he simply couldn't pursue anything with me anymore because now the whole situation was public, not just between me, him, and my friend. People were starting to judge both of us for it, and he told me he didn’t want that kind of drama in his life. To me, this reads as “If I cut my ties with you, I can save my reputation,” but maybe I’m taking on too much of a victim mentality with that. He mentioned that he wanted his time online to be a simple escape from whatever was going on in his personal life, and I do understand how a conflict like this might ruin that for him. Just feels bad to hear, I guess.

Now it all just seems so silly and childish. Until his last message to me, I maintained that my connection with the guy felt so genuine and like it could really go somewhere, which is why I felt so conflicted about how to handle the situation between me and my friend. Had she been upfront from the very beginning, things might have played out differently. As it stands though, it feels like it was doomed from the moment she told me to go for it. She encouraged something that was making her uncomfortable, hid how she felt about it until I started to express enjoyment from it, then posed an ultimatum that would have ruined the friendship regardless. If I had cut things off with the guy right when she told me she didn’t like it, I’d have been doing a disservice to myself just to please her. Because I didn’t do that, I’ve lost her as a friend.

For both my relationship with her and the developing feelings I had for this guy to be boiled down to some petty discord e-drama is so heartbreaking. I thought we all were a little more grown up than for it to all come crashing down the way it did.

TL;DR

A friend told me that my flirting with a guy was making her uncomfortable. I didn’t stop flirting with him. Now I’ve lost her and the guy.