Advice please!: Friend/roommate knows I have a crush on him and now we don’t talk anymore

TLDR: friend who I have a crush on is now my roommate and I can barely function around him

Kind of a long story but here goes: I (19F) met one of my roommates (19M) at the start of first year university last year, and I pretty much liked him immediately. He lived down the hall from me and would often hang out in my apartment with mutual friends, and sometimes when it was just me. I didn’t want to make it obvious how I felt because I didn’t want to scare him away, and i guess it worked because we became friends. He would actively invite me to hang out both in groups and sometimes just us. He treated me like he genuinely liked having me around, and even told me that he liked talking to me. We had a lot of classes together and would usually walk to them together, study together, etc, and I’d say that overall I was pretty comfortable around him. At the time he didn’t seem like he suspected I had any feelings toward him besides platonic, but basically everyone in our immediate circle had picked up on the fact that I liked him. Things stayed pretty good for the rest of the semester, but then things started changing when the second term started. I felt like he didn’t come by to talk to me as much, he started asking other people for help with school instead of me, when I had previously been his go-to for academics, he didn’t ask me to walk to class with him any more, and started hanging out with my roommates without inviting me. At that point my roommates at the time(both 18/19F) had started to exclude me from various activities, and I started to suspect that maybe they told him how I felt. I asked them multiple times if they did, and they always denied it but I couldn’t help my feelings of mistrust. They previously were pretty sympathetic about my feelings, but eventually they started trying to set him up with girls in front of me, and would tell me that I never had a chance. Despite this, we saw enough of each other that when it was time to figure out living situations for the next school year, him and a mutual friend asked if I wanted to rent a place with them, and with few other options I said yes. We all moved into our place a few days ago, and I thought that maybe having space for the summer would help things fall back into a place of friendship at this point. But no, things are still off. To complicate things further, yesterday I learned that my suspicions were correct and that my roommates DID mention how I felt, if not to him directly, then by making comments about it in front of him. So I guess that means he’s known for a while, and now I feel like I don’t know how to talk to him like a normal person, which is difficult to avoid now that I live with him. Things aren’t too bad when in a group setting, but when we’re alone I shut down and have no idea what to do. I’m afraid of coming across like a obsessed or making him uncomfortable, and I don’t know how to get to a place where I don’t feel guilty starting a conversation, like I’m forcing him to talk to me. I’m trying to act casual and like nothing is wrong but it doesn’t seem to be making any difference.

Any advice would be appreciated, especially regarding how to start and maintain casual conversations with him again.

Submitted September 08, 2022 at 01:08AM

TLDR: friend who I have a crush on is now my roommate and I can barely function around himKind of a long story but here goes: I (19F) met one of my roommates (19M) at the start of first year university last year, and I pretty much liked him immediately. He lived down the hall from me and would often hang out in my apartment with mutual friends, and sometimes when it was just me. I didn’t want to make it obvious how I felt because I didn’t want to scare him away, and i guess it worked because we became friends. He would actively invite me to hang out both in groups and sometimes just us. He treated me like he genuinely liked having me around, and even told me that he liked talking to me. We had a lot of classes together and would usually walk to them together, study together, etc, and I’d say that overall I was pretty comfortable around him. At the time he didn’t seem like he suspected I had any feelings toward him besides platonic, but basically everyone in our immediate circle had picked up on the fact that I liked him. Things stayed pretty good for the rest of the semester, but then things started changing when the second term started. I felt like he didn’t come by to talk to me as much, he started asking other people for help with school instead of me, when I had previously been his go-to for academics, he didn’t ask me to walk to class with him any more, and started hanging out with my roommates without inviting me. At that point my roommates at the time(both 18/19F) had started to exclude me from various activities, and I started to suspect that maybe they told him how I felt. I asked them multiple times if they did, and they always denied it but I couldn’t help my feelings of mistrust. They previously were pretty sympathetic about my feelings, but eventually they started trying to set him up with girls in front of me, and would tell me that I never had a chance. Despite this, we saw enough of each other that when it was time to figure out living situations for the next school year, him and a mutual friend asked if I wanted to rent a place with them, and with few other options I said yes. We all moved into our place a few days ago, and I thought that maybe having space for the summer would help things fall back into a place of friendship at this point. But no, things are still off. To complicate things further, yesterday I learned that my suspicions were correct and that my roommates DID mention how I felt, if not to him directly, then by making comments about it in front of him. So I guess that means he’s known for a while, and now I feel like I don’t know how to talk to him like a normal person, which is difficult to avoid now that I live with him. Things aren’t too bad when in a group setting, but when we’re alone I shut down and have no idea what to do. I’m afraid of coming across like a obsessed or making him uncomfortable, and I don’t know how to get to a place where I don’t feel guilty starting a conversation, like I’m forcing him to talk to me. I’m trying to act casual and like nothing is wrong but it doesn’t seem to be making any difference.Any advice would be appreciated, especially regarding how to start and maintain casual conversations with him again.