Bobcats should keep friends and hook-ups separate, but if it accidentally happens — honesty is the best policy when it comes to the line between friendship and relationship.
Q: I drunkenly hooked up with my friend and now they have feelings for me, but I don’t have feelings for them back. What do I do?
This is one of the worst situations to deal with. You almost feel obligated to tell the person that you don’t feel the same but also don’t want to lose their friendship as a result.
The best advice I could give is to not hook up with your friends, but you have a few options available to you if you do.
The most obvious option is to be honest and tell them that you don’t feel the same. This can work if you don’t have a strong connection with this person — a friend of a friend kind of thing — but becomes more difficult when dealing with someone that you really like. You never want to hurt someone’s feelings but you don’t want to lead them on either.
{{tncms-asset app="editorial" id="29c90d72-4abb-11e5-a505-af97ab59fb14"}}
You could ignore them, which seems to be the route that a lot of people are taking these days. But ignoring people always blows up in your face because odds are you’re going to see that person at some point. Athens is a smaller place than you think and you run into people all the time, which leaves you with one last option.
Stay with them. Sometimes you just want to ride it out and hope they lose feelings quickly. This is the worst option because you often end up talking yourself into feelings that aren’t truly there and you become the one thing you don’t want to be in life: stuck.
Again, the best thing to do is avoid hooking up with friends but, short of that, just tell them the truth. A week of awkwardness is better than months of unhappiness.
Kellen Becoats is a junior studying journalism. Have a question about how to hooking up with someone? Email him at kb749012@ohio.edu.
Hooking up with a friend is never a good idea.
You already care for each other and adding sex into the equation can make those platonic feelings quickly turn into romantic feelings. No matter how well you think the two of you could handle being in that situation and keeping it casual, someone is bound to get hurt.
If you're lucky and it's not you who's feelings skyrocket, you've still found yourself in a pickle. Be delicate when handling the situation. This person is still a friend of yours and you want them in your life — don't go about it in a way that could hurt said friend.
It's best to put it all out there on the table and talk about it in the mature manner we wished we handled all other matters of the heart. Emotions are awkward and uncomfortable to begin with. Keep their feelings in mind and maybe think more about the possible outcome the next time you're in the mood and drunk and the only person around is a friend.
Next time, it could be you who falls hard and, let me tell you, the landing isn't pretty.
Abbey Peyton is a senior studying broadcast journalism. Any advice at all, send it her way at ap384611@ohio.edu.
