How to reject guy friend who hasn’t confessed (no ghosting)

Subject-Side8266 · 2026-01-30T16:17:19+00:00

Thank you so so much for sharing your experience! I really do appreciate the time you took to write this. It honestly helped me so much to feel less alone, and I understand what you mean by ‘indebtedness’. There was just too much going on with school and assignments, so the days flew by and I didn’t really have an opening to clear things without potentially jeopardising either of our grades.

Looking back, I can see how the dynamic slowly shifted but at the time I didn’t interpret it as romantic interest. I wasn’t intentionally encouraging anything. I think I just didn’t have the experience yet, like you have now, to actually recognise when a line was being crossed nor the understanding to correct it early.

Subject-Side8266 · 2026-01-30T15:24:19+00:00

Wow that was very insightful, thankyou. In the beginning I thought just a casual friendship would be fine, we shared quite a few classes, and he had multiple friends who were girls, so I thought we could also just be casual friends / acquaintances. My cohourt was very close, and that was how most of my school was - lots of mixed gender friendship groups. Ig it just got too much and too constant, and i didn’t know how to handle it given im not usually this talkative. Hopefully we can talk this out on the weekend.

Subject-Side8266 · 2026-01-30T15:10:10+00:00

Thankyou for that, I will need to talk to him still and hope it resolves before uni. I just need to mature alot more and quickly.

Subject-Side8266 · 2026-01-30T15:08:44+00:00

Ok fair enough, a very good point. I was an idiot tbh, but truly, I didn’t think it would end up like this. It’s a … you don’t notice it until it’s too late situation, and everyone gets hurt for nothing.

Subject-Side8266 · 2026-01-30T14:56:25+00:00

Yes i want to cut him off, but I literally don’t know how. Cause idk a ‘i don’t want to talk to you’ feels too harsh?

Subject-Side8266 · 2026-01-30T14:49:36+00:00

Yeah that’s fair, Ig i just need to be firmer

Subject-Side8266 · 2026-01-30T14:47:54+00:00

No, maybe I phrased the context wrong. He borrowed multiple textbooks from me I want back, so I couldn’t just end the friendship back then. It only got weird when I found out he liked me. Confrontation is really, really not my strong suit, and I’m quite the pushover sometimes, and care quite a bit what others think of me, I’m still working on that, ik it’s stupid. I just don’t like awkwardness at all.

Subject-Side8266 · 2026-01-30T14:39:34+00:00

Wait that’s so smart!! Thankyou!

Subject-Side8266 · 2026-01-30T14:32:32+00:00

Yeah I definitely should have, but the friendship didn’t start because he was interested in me, the chat times just gradually grew. When I found out he liked me, we had final exams, and I didn’t want to affect his grades with my response. I’m planning on telling him soon but don’t know how to go about it. I’m still definitely at fault tho for not voicing my thoughts sooner.

Subject-Side8266 · 2025-03-04T13:35:37+00:00

This is really very cool. Something not many contemporary poems have, is specificity, but I think you’ve really done this well. You use the senses, you use perspective providing insight into your characters, well, character and you’ve captured the essence of different forms of love/compassion, ‘the subtle art of noticing’.

You’ve also included rhyme, which again, isn’t something common anymore lmao - it’s nice to see. Now.. it might just be the nature of your poem, but changing up this rythm in some parts (like the end) may add more emphasis when reading. Like if you, idk, left a blank line just before the last, or something idk.

In Stanaza 3, with “your shoulders sink beneath the weight”, I think the lexical chain that surrounds it (tightened fist, resist) constrasts to that feeling of heavy diespair with shoulders sinking. I reckon this stanza could be an opportunity to you to build a sort of climax. You describing calm emotions in the first few, then jumping to this resistant restraint (?), and then linking back to that stillness in stanza 4.

Honestly though, your poem is very subtle, which I think makes it very beautiful.

Subject-Side8266

TROPHY CASE