Dating a friend

Tom and I at a party sophmore year.. back in my brunette days!

Tom and I lived in the same dorm our freshman year. I spent a lot of time in the common area studying and he seemed to spend a lot of time in the common area watching TV. Early on, he didn’t seem like he was interested in dating anyone, and I definitely couldn’t see him dating a friend like me.






Spending all that time together in the common area, you can only ignore each other for so long and one day he asked me if I wanted anything from the cafeteria. I needed a break, so I offered to go downstairs with him. At the time, I thought he seemed a little surprised that I offered, but that’s literally how our friendship was born.






Well, to be honest, our friendship really started about 15 minutes later when we both got a Diet Coke and a package of Ding Dongs for lunch. We had a good laugh over our “well-balanced” eating habits. We basically got to know each other after that. Tom is extremely intelligent. He’s one of those guys that just gets physics. Who just gets physics? Not me and he started to tutor me threw it. He’s an easy guy to get along with and we seemed to have a lot in common, including our “well-balanced” diets which lead to both of us gaining the dreaded freshman 15. I was comfortable with him.






So we started spending time together as friends. I didn’t think anything of it. I probably have more guy-friends than girlfriends, so it didn’t seem strange to eat dinners in the dining hall together, go to one of the campus commons to watch a football game, or just “hang out.” I never saw Tom as anything more than a friend. Thinking back on it, I don’t know why I didn’t see him that way. He’s an attractive guy and someone that I should have been interested in. When we met, he had a girlfriend back home, so perhaps that’s why. We fell into a friendship and that’s just what it was going to be…I really don’t know.






He eventually broke up with the girlfriend – I think it was about 4 or 5 months after we met, during Easter break. We called each other often, sent text messages, forwarded silly emails. We talked about his breakup. It didn’t seem weird to talk about each other’s relationships and we were really sounding boards for each other on the opposite sex.






We returned to school and fell into the same hang out routine, nothing felt different. I think it was some time in early May, I came back from a party alone at two am and found him watching TV in the common area again. I didn’t feel like going to bed yet, so I stopped by and said hi. He asked me about my night and I told about how I was upset because I hoped this guy was going to ask for my number, but he didn’t. Tom told me not to worry about it and that I deserved better.






After that, we started hanging out more than usual. I think most of our friends thought we were dating, but we weren’t. It’s safe to say that I thought of Tom as my best friend around this time. He continued to help me with physics and truth be told, I would never have passed Physics 1A and 1B without him.






We still talked about anything and everything. When I had my heart broken, he was the first person I told. He told me about how he was interested in dating a friend, but he wasn’t sure how to get out of the friend zone. It never occurred to me that he was talking about me. I thought it was some girl that he was hanging out with from his gamer club (aka nerd club).






We weren’t able to live together the next year. We talked about it, but I wanted to join rush and try living the sorority life (it is all that it’s cracked up to be – drama every day and if you’re a well-grounded girl, you’ll find it highly entertaining while making some lifelong friends). Of course, he made fun of me for being a Delta Delta Delta and yes, I’ve heard ALL the tri-delt jokes.






We still saw each other several times a week. We’d grab lunch and he’d stop by my room just to talk and hang out. At the time, I thought it was just to check out my sorority sisters. We watched movies and would sit close together on the couch. I threw my feet in his lap, he threw his head in mine. It was just comfortable. We continued to discuss our love lives. He dated one girl for a while, but it didn’t work out, so he asked me for dating a friend advice. I asked him why I couldn’t seem to maintain a long-term relationship. We really were best friends.

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