How Could She Hook Up With My Crush?

I’ve been crushing on the same girl for like a year now and all of my friends know about my crush. Sadly she hasn’t given me any signs that she’s into me at all but I’m working on it, I do think I’m basically her type so I have some hope on that. So that is where that stands. I was out of town last month and missed a big party all my friends were at and I found out afterwards that one of my friends hooked up with my crush. 

I didn’t hear it straight from her, but from other friends, clearly she didn’t want me to know but it was very out in the open and everybody at the party was aware of it. I feel very hurt by this because she knew I had a crush on this person, and I have reason to believe that they have continued to hook up after that party. How do I approach talking to her about this without seeming crazy or possessive?

Valerie: I think first you have to interrogate how you feel about this before you talk to your friend about it, and what you want to get out of this conversation. Is your primary goal salvaging your friendship? Could you be willing to accept that perhaps your friend and your crush were a better fit, since as you said, your crush didn’t seem to reciprocate? The fact that your friend hasn’t brought it up with you herself means probably she knows it wasn’t the best friend move, so if you think you can have a conversation in a way that’s more “I still want to be your friend but I do want to talk about the elephant in the room” than “how dare you,” then I think you have to be clear with her that that’s the conversation you want to have before starting it. In that conversation you can talk about how it hurt your feelings, both that she hooked up with your crush and then didn’t tell you about it, but even though you might feel betrayed, you WEREN’T dating this person or even hooking up, so as two consenting adults, they haven’t betrayed you, not in the way it probably feels. It’s possible your friend has also had a crush on her just as long as you and just hasn’t verbalized it. It’s possible they’ve almost hooked up before and your friend has tried to push away her feelings until that night and now the dam is broken. It’s possible your crush made the first move and your friend didn’t realize she had feelings for them until that moment. There are a lot of reasons it went down the way it did, and you won’t know until you talk, and you can only really talk if you’re open to hearing her side of it from a place of understanding that you had no claim on this crush. You said you were “working on it” and that you thought you were her type but you have no way of knowing if that was ever going to become anything without asking your crush directly. I think if it’s been a year, either it wasn’t going to happen, or your crush got tired of waiting. And I think you can only have this conversation with your friend if it comes from a place of genuine curiosity and wanting to salvage the friendship after they did something to hurt you as a friend, and not from a place of accusations of betrayal as if they slept with your partner.

Summer: I’m with Valerie in saying that your friend’s actions weren’t out of line. Being interested in someone does not give you a claim over how they conduct themselves, or how others conduct themselves to your interest. If that were the case, a quarter of the women in my undergrad would have been ‘off limits’ to everyone I knew. At worst, I think it’s a little impolite to pursue someone your friend is into. However, you haven’t pursued your crush enough to establish anything exclusive or formal. From your crush’s perspective… you don’t have the right to influence their decisions. If this all went down consenting-adults-style, then that’s just between the people involved. I know what it’s like being the uninvolved party who gets hurt when my crush finds someone else, but it’s not their fault. In that position, a cold Machiavellian approach would say that I failed to pursue in time and this is the natural consequence. More realistically, my interest didn’t pan out and people’s lives simply continued.

Given your rationale, I don’t see a way to talk this out with your friend or ‘confront’ them about it without you seeming possessive over someone you don’t really have a social claim over.

I live in a Midwest city, and I dated through it years ago. The only possibility I have in dating here is for someone to move (not likely) or to come out (I’ve dated enough baby gays, and I don’t think I could do this again). My dating app radiuses are set WIDE. Ideally I would like to move to another city to be with someone, but I’d like to postpone that until I actually meet someone bc living here is cheap as heck! How do I meet my dreamboat? I travel, but focusing on finding someone while I’m away feels forced, and spending too much time on apps keeps me from being present! A Camp was a solution for me in the past, but now it lives on in our hearts and dreams. Please help, thanks in advance!

Valerie: My advice would be to join online communities. Find something you’re interested in – whether it’s a TV show or video game, a sport, a craft, a hobby, etc – and find the queer spaces within those fandoms. A lot of communities have Discords or messaging boards or other such online spaces, and a lot of those spaces have a way to chat about things unrelated to the topic at hand, like a location-based Discord channel, or a place to chat about dating. It’s a fun way to meet new people without the stakes of dating apps, and with a built-in mutual interest. Some might even organize meetups, which would be a way to travel to a new place but not be scouring the apps the whole time to meet new people. And meeting these new people don’t even have to be just dating options; you never know who has a gay cousin they want to introduce you to! So it would be a win-win, new friends + new potential dating pool.

Nico: Besides people moving there or coming out, people can also break up and re-enter the dating pool or decide to start dating again after focusing on other life priorities. I live in a smaller city, and it can feel like you know everyone, but you probably don’t know everyone — you’ll just have only one to three degrees of separation max. That said, I think that focusing on your interests and developing yourself is a great way to be your best self when your “dreamboat” does come along. And if you’re tired of living where you are, and you can find ways to afford to do so, moving can be a really amazing refresh.

Riese: I understand not wanting to spend your vacation times going on potentially fruitless dates, but when I lived in the midwest I did actually meet a future partner just by matching on tinder when I was out in L.A. for work and then we just kept chatting when I was back home and then eventually visited each other and stuff. So that could be an option for you too! I’m sad that A-Camp can’t provide that for you anymore! You c