He’s just a friend you keep telling yourself.

You aren’t bothered when he doesn’t immediately respond to your messages, you aren’t bothered when he compliments someone else over you, you aren’t bothered by the fact you don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.

He’s just a friend, so why would you be bothered?

Because he’s your friend your stomach doesn’t flip when he messages you, you’re used to seeing his name on your phone, you message each other every day out of routine, not because your worlds would fall apart without each other.

You two being friends means you don’t get jealous when he’s talking to you about the new girl he’s seeing, you don’t care. As his friend you care about when it’s going wrong with someone who loves him, you don’t want him to get hurt because you’d do anything for him … but that’s how everyone feels about all their friends right? You’d go to the ends of the earth for them and back again, if it meant they wouldn’t have to get hurt by someone.

As his friend, you know where you stand. There are no crossed boundaries or blurred lines. You stand on one side and he firmly stands on the other. Everything is just easy and uncomplicated.

Because you’re friends, you know he loves you and you know that anyone you date will see that too but remain undeterred, it won’t bother them because they’ll see that your friendship is straight forward and they never need to get jealous.

The two of you being so close means that you can run to him when the other guys you trust hurt you. You know that when he wraps his arms around you and holds you that there’s nothing in it, because the two of you are just friends.

You don’t wish that he was the one you’d been with in the first place, because you know that he would never hurt you the way some of the others have done, because you’d never cross a line like that. Complicating things is messy and no one likes messy.

Except …..

None of that is true. Not a single word.

And trust me, no one will get it, because it’s complicated.