Dear Coming Through The Rye Staff,

I have been friends with this guy since 8th grade we are now juniors in HS. Last year I told him I had developed feelings for him when he has liked me in 9th grade but I didn’t feel the same way about him then until sophomore year. He started to show signs of liking me again in about January and I told him in October. We were on a field trip mid may right before school was out and he did something I didn’t approve of involving alcohol and we didn’t talk all summer. School started and we talked and both have gotten over it and have kind of started talking again. We were both at a party the other night and all he did was stare at me from across the room. I walked up to him and sat with him for a good portion of the night and his attention was only on me, and when I left he walked up to me and asked me why I had left and where I had gone. Well we haven’t really talked much since then except for the fact he came up to me and told me I had no “a*s” -_- when I was with one of my friends who came up to me and smacked me on the butt and that’s when he shouted that and people are always calling us love birds and ask us if we’re dating. He’s never had a girlfriend, and when we went out kind of on a double I can probably count the words he said on one hand, but when I’m with him and he has friends to fall back on he’s fine.

What’s up with him? Every time I look at him he doesn’t look away, and just treats me so much more different than anyone else. He’s usually very outgoing except when he’s around me and I was the first one to ask him out and he was extremely nervous the whole time. And he gets incredibly jealous when he sees me with/around other guys. And he has been starting this thing lately where he will rub up against me even if we are in a empty room and is always in my bubble, but he also acts like he likes me somedays and others like I’m not even there. But last year before school was over after the whole drinking incident he and I had a serious conversation face to face and he told me he didn’t see me as anything but a friend. But he’s been acting extremely weird lately, and posting all this stuff on twitter like “you were made for me” and “I wanna tell you everything, how I feel what I want and what I wanna do with our lives” and he posted today “I don’t think I can wait till the end of the week to ask you” whatever that means.

Sincerely,

Maci

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Dear Maci,

Thank you for writing to us here at Coming Through The Rye. I’d like to start out by saying that feelings at your age are very tricky, and even more difficult to decipher. I think that the first thing I noticed after I read your letter was that you didn’t mention how you feel about your crush right now. I’m inferring that you still like him through the title, and from your concern over his most subtle actions. There are a few things that we can address here. First of all, you mention that he sends you mixed signals, as in he ignores you some days and on other days he’s very warm towards you. I think this issue comes from you two not speaking over the summer. If you two were good friends, there’s probably some awkwardness between you two over not speaking over the summer. There’s been a distance now between the two of you, and it’s important to realize that and take it into account. He might recall being your friend at times, and other times, he might feel upset (so he might not be over what happened over summer) and so his way of projecting that is by ignoring you sometimes (when he is upset). From my experience, it will take time and patience for the friendship to resume some stability and normality. Also, if you add high school, and adolescence, things can get really confusing!

The actions you mentioned about him make it very difficult to analyze his behavior. See, him getting jealous could mean that he is simply protective of you. But then he has these tweets, but we don’t know who they are exactly about. He told you at the end of the school year last year that he only saw you as a friend…perhaps he’s not ready for anything more, especially if the double date was awkward. I can’t tell you what to do or expect here, but if I were you, I would focus on the friendship between you two and treat him as you would any other friend, because it sounds like you value him very much. Once the friendship seems stable, perhaps you can bring up the fact that you feel there is some weird tension going on. Right now, he seems to value you as a friend as well, and might be thinking about you as more than a friend, but he might be scared to make a move. Or, he could need time to move on from what happened over the summer and then consider you as more than a friend.

I encourage you to add more to this dialogue.

Catching those before they fall and helping those who have fallen back up,

Antolini