Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
Hello again, Dr. NerdLove!
I have a follow-up to a question I asked a few months ago. I really appreciated your response.
For context, within my friend group, I’m definitely one to get flustered easily, especially when it comes to talking about anything sexual. I turn bright red. My friends think this is very funny and like to tease me about it, which usually doesn’t bother me that much since they keep it light-hearted and just laugh at my reactions. (We watched Wuthering Heights and I had my face buried in a pillow for half of it…)
However, Kay started to like teasing me about it as well. Which, given my feelings, is obviously more difficult for me to deal with. I also feel she’d take it farther than my other friends. She would read sexual passages from books to get me flustered, talk about kinks, etc. After an incident where she was talking about BDSM to me and asking me about my thoughts on it, I tried to get out the “hey I can’t tell if you’re being flirty” and said it more as “Please don’t talk about things like BDSM with me, it messes with my brain.” She said thanks for letting her know and that she wouldn’t bring it up again.
Since then, she hasn’t had a direct conversation with me about, say, BDSM specifically, and backed off a bit on the sexual stuff. However, she still would tease me about sex scenes in movies, my shyness talking about romance, etc. She started talking about a threesome in a show to me, to which I said “no”. She and another friend were trying to get me to watch Pillion with them, which… no.
I also tell my friends I really don’t like being touched, which is true. Kay though started poking me a lot, getting in my personal space, etc. She also liked staring intensely at me, which also causes me to get flustered. I’ve asked her before why she pokes me and she said “the same reason you poke your cats”, which I assume means to get a reaction out of me/get my attention?
I was a bit more distant the last week (stress, etc) and I think she noticed. I invited a couple friends to go on a walk and she came along, and would not stop poking me, sneaking up behind me, standing really close to me, putting her head on my shoulder. She asked me to carry her, and I just said “why?” She said because she was tired… I just said “no, we’re almost home.”
It made me feel conflicted and confused again. I’ve still been sort of intentionally vague about my feelings, but she still knows I asked her out at one point. It honestly hurt and I spent all night overthinking about what it meant.
I’d been letting her keep touching me because to be honest, part of me liked it, and getting that sweet dopamine hit/arousal felt nice. However, I know it’s not good for me to keep enjoying/interpreting something sexually when there’s nothing there, both for my mental health and for our friendship. I wish that I could just interpret touch as a normal chill thing, but I am extremely sensitive to touch, and it always feels very intimate/invasive to me.
So, I told her that basically touch has a different effect on me than I think she intends. She apologized and said she’ll stop from now on. I said she didn’t have to be sorry, but that I’m sensitive to touch and don’t want to misinterpret her, and that I valued the friendship. She just said okay to that.
I don’t know, though, at what point it’s too much for my nervous system to keep being friends. I feel bad for having to constantly tell her no. It’s already hard for me to set boundaries, and I’m probably too vague about my reasons, but I also get frustrated that she brings up things I’ve asked her not to or get uncomfortable with. It also feels like I get rejected again every time I say her behavior confuses me or I don’t want to misinterpret her, and she says ok, which I see as confirmation that she doesn’t like me in that way.
It’s been more awkward since the whole touch thing. I do miss chatting with her about certain things and miss her friendship. I just also want to move on, and I feel like as long as I keep getting these interactions that my brain starts going crazy again trying to read the tea leaves. It feels like an addiction, trying to decode her behavior, feeling hopeful for a moment, then crashing when I remind myself nothing has changed.
I also want her to… I don’t know, respect me as a sexual/romantic being that might find it hard to hear certain things from an unrequited crush. Another part of me thinks that at this point, even if she did like me, her message would be so vague that I might not even want to date her.
Do I try and say something again? Is the struggle because I haven’t been clear about what I feel? How direct do I need to be? Do I just back off from the friendship? It makes me feel like I’m going crazy. It really hurts, and makes me feel like a bad friend.
A Touch Too Much
You’re not being a bad friend, ATTM, you’re just not communicating things well, and what you’re trying to say isn’t coming across the way you intend to the person you’re saying it to. And to be perfectly honest, this sounds like it’s a continuation of the problem you were having in your previous letter of not being able to tell Kay how you were feeling.
This, admittedly, isn’t being helped by the sort of teasing Kay does.
It sounds a little like Kay is the sort of person who’s a notch below a habitual line-stepper. A habitual line-stepper is someone who gets some form of enjoyment over doing things they know they’re not “supposed” to do, and doing so juuuuuust enough that it seems almost petty to complain. They’re the sort of person who makes a joke that’s just a little over the borderline to being offensive and “doesn’t get” why folks think that such a minor transgression is worth getting upset over, or why saying things that verge on being offensive or upsetting or otherwise just needling the people around them. When consequences do finally happen, they’re the first to complain that it’s underserved and unjustified and they’re the ones being wronged. They’re the sort of person who likes to describe themselves as “a gadfly” or who pretends that they’re making a point about… something. Someone who thinks that being offensive for clout and/or grins is a substitute for a personality.
You know. Assholes.
Kay, it sounds like, is a perpetual tease; the sort of person who thinks it’s funny getting a specific rise out of someone, but has a less… call it “malignant” motivation. It’s a little closer to cute-aggression; they do it because the reaction they think the reaction they’re getting out of you is adorable, but harmless. It’s akin to her example of poking a cat because the “power up” noise they make when you wake them up, or doing little tease-y behaviors to them to get them to react. People do it because they think the cat’s reaction is cute and they know that they don’t have ill-intent behind it. It’s with affection, as much as anything else, and the reaction is part of what drives that affection.
The problem is that nobody explains this to the cat, who’s usually getting annoyed by the behavior.
Somewhat ironically, you and Kay have the reverse problem of someone who’s gently teasing their cat. In this case, Kay is the one who doesn’t realize what’s going on and why this is a problem. You know you still have a crush on Kay, which means that her teasing hits differently. Kay, on the other hand, has no idea that her teasing is being received in the confusing way that it is. She may think it’s cute and adorable the way you react; if she knew that this was creating such a conflict in you, I suspect her behavior would be different.
How different, though is another question. While a lot of her behavior may be affectionate in a friendly sort of way, some of it feels very… well, for lack of a better term, “bratty”, in the BDSM sense of the term. While friendship, especially between women, can be expressed in more physically intimate ways, some of her antics, like putting her head on your shoulder or asking you to carry her read like a bratty sub trying to get a rise out of her top to me.
Is that what’s going on? No idea; I’m not there and I’m more prone to read flirtation into this because my job means it’s gonna be front of mind most of the time. But at the very least it’s setting my Spidey-sense tingling.
The biggest issue, though, is that lack of clear communication, which is what’s creating problems. It’s understandable that you have a hard time expressing yourself and trying to say what you’re feeling when you’re already having to push past the mortification of having to say it at all, especially to someone you kinda like. However, this is precisely the sort of thing that creates misunderstandings, because people can’t read minds. It’s entirely possible that when you told Kay that talking about BDSM messes with your mind, that she took it as “I have trauma/triggers around the topic”, which is part of why she dropped the subject but still teases you around sex.
The same thing applies to the way that you told her that her touching you has a different effect than what she intends. Since it seems like she doesn’t know you still have a thing for her, she took it less as “I’m trying to maintain a boundary because I don’t think you like me the way I like you” and more “you think this is funny, but it’s hurting me in some way”. Which is technically accurate, but not on the way that you meant.
This, incidentally, is why being intentionally vague about feelings is usually not a good idea. It may avoid an immediate issue – like having to have an awkward conversation about “I like you but not in that way” – but it leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding. People are going to rush to fill in those gaps based on their own priors, which may be nothing like what you intended. Or would have intended, if you could spit it out, anyway.
Here’s the thing: it’s good to tell people “no” when you need to, even if you have to say it frequently. You have every right to have boundaries and to enforce them, and it’s important to practice both establishing them and maintaining them. Even when it’s hard for you. Especially when it’s hard for you. That doesn’t make you a bad friend; if anything, it makes you a better friend, because you’re telling them that this behavior or that action is getting in the way of your ability to be their friend.
The reason why it’s so stressful and hard on your nervous system is in no small part because the way you’ve been establishing and explaining these boundaries has been incomplete. What you’ve been telling her has been true, as far as it all goes, but it hasn’t been the whole truth, and it’s been parceled out in dribs and drabs. That’s part of why you’ve had to have this conversation multiple times; you’ve told her that this kind of teasing is a problem, and so she stops, but moves on to a different kind that presumably isn’t going to hit those triggers. The problem is, the reason why you’re establishing that boundary is less the teasing and more the way that the teasing from her, specifically, affects you. It would be one thing if you could relax and enjoy it in that (again, scratch a sex nerd, get a sexual comparison) bratty sub kind of way.
If you’ll forgive an inelegant and somewhat problematic metaphor, it’s a little like training a pet; when the training is inconsistent and the reinforcement variable, it’s hard on the pet, because they don’t quite know what they’re doing wrong. As a result, they’ll often back off entirely, simply because they don’t know what’s going to get praise and what’s going to get correction.
This is what’s happening between you and Kay. She’s not respecting you as a sexual/romantic being in part because she doesn’t realize that her teasing is hitting you this way. She’s not rejecting you or confirming that she doesn’t feel the way that you do, because she doesn’t know that this is something you’re feeling. She’s just trying to figure out how to express herself with you in the way that she sees as being affectionate, but keeps messing up or upsetting you in some way. So it’s not entirely a surprise that she’s pulled back. When everything she normally does causes problems, it’s understandable that she’s going to pull back entirely until she feels like she’s found a new equilibrium with you.
I don’t think you need to back off the friendship entirely, and honestly, I suspect that both you and Kay would be the sadder for it. This isn’t a toxic friendship or dealing with someone who thinks that boundaries are things that happen to other people. This is a relationship where there’s something large and important hanging over the interaction, and it’s causing problems because people either can’t see it or are trying to avoid mentioning it like the proverbial elephant in the room. And unfortunately for everyone involved, it’s just making everything even more fraught and stressful.
This may be great fodder for a Regency-like, slow burn friends-to-lovers romance, but it’s a fucking nightmare to actually live through. Especially when nobody is actually doing anything wrong, and everyone is trying to figure out how to keep things going without upsetting the someone else.
I think the best thing you could do here would be to have a direct conversation with Kay – an Awkward Conversation, specifically, where you admit that yes, you still have a crush on her and you are pretty sure she doesn’t feel the same for you. As a result, her teasing is hitting you in a way that both gets your hopes up and dashes them at the same time, and the dissonance it creates is both stressful and upsetting, which makes it hard to even enjoy the oxytocin rush of it all.
Of course, that’s easy for me to say. I don’t have any skin in the game, and I’m not the one who gets flustered and has a hard time expressing themselves to their crush. So the stakes, challenges and consequences for me – an uninvolved third party – are quite literally non-existant. For you, they feel very high and very real indeed. Whether the stakes and resultant consequences are actually that high is a different question, but the fact that it feels that fraught for you remains. So, in order to get around that stress and anxiety, it may be easier for you to write it all out instead and hand it to her or read it out loud so that you’re not trying to get the words past the filter in your mind before they reach your mouth.
If you do decide to write it out, then the best thing you can do is lay it out clearly so that you can explain what the problem is, why it affects you the way that it does and – critically – suggestions that might work better that would maintain your dynamic as friends, but without stressing you out to the point of collapse.
(Or, y’know, hope that this is all the precursor to her admitting that she’s been trying to flirt with you and has been taking your responses as rejection of her. Which also would bring this whole Regency slow burn full circle, and then you can both write it all up with Kay handling all the smutty parts and have yourself a best-selling book series that gets optioned by Netflix or Amazon…)
Will this be embarrassing? Yes, full stop. It absolutely will be. You will probably want to dig a hole and then pull it in after you if and when you hand over the letter. But, as with many similar circumstances, it’s the sort of discomfort that not only will be over in a moment, but that will lead to relief as soon as it’s done. You most likely will have cleared the air with Kay and you and she can find a new way to make your friendship work that doesn’t stress one or both of you out. Or she’ll realize that you’ve both been talking past each other and you’ll have an opportunity to see if there’s more than platonic friendship going on here.
I’ll be honest: I would bet money on it being the former, rather than the latter. But while that might be disappointing in the short term, it will still pay off in helping clear the air and making it possible for you two to resume your friendship.
And regardless of how it turns out, this will be good practice for you in terms of establishing boundaries, but also being able to express yourself clearly and directly when needed. Even if it’s really difficult and uncomfortable in the moment… which are often the times you need to do so the most.
If you do decide to lay it all out there – letter or not – then write back and let us know how it goes. And if you end up co-writing that slow-burn series, name a side character after me.
Good luck.
