Sorry this is so long,
TL;DR I recently developed very strong feelings for my best friend I have known for about a decade. And don’t know what to do. I guess I am typing this out to clear my head.
So for a back story my friend Rachael 34F and I 40M met at work. I was a retail team lead and she was a new hire so I trained her and we developed a very good professional relationship that developed into a friendship. She had a boyfriend at the time who she eventually married. This was never an issue because we all hung out together fairly regularly as friends. Eventually I left that job for a career change after a couple years and that took me out of state. We would talk semi-regularly while I was gone and when I would come out to visit family I would see her for casual dinner and drinks.
About 4 years ago Rachael got a divorce and while I talked to her about it. It was just two friends talking through everything as you do. Then about a year ago we got together when I came back to visit family and we ended up having a very intimate conversation for about 6 hours about everything in life and it was the most intense conversation we had ever had to that point. Now I have had these types of conversations with other friends and female friends before so I didn’t really think much of it besides maybe that our friendship was getting more intimate and closer than before. Since that day we have talked basically most of every day since. Then when I came back for Thanksgiving this last year we had the same type of conversation. I thought maybe we might have some chemistry but I figured I was just imagining things and eventually those feelings died down.
Finally, I moved back to be close to my family about 3 months ago. And since then, we have spent a lot of time together we both get up super early for work so we generally only hang out on weekends. Every time we do we end up having these very long deep conversations where we talk about and tell each other everything, interspersed with jokes and stupid pop culture stuff. Due to this I thought there might be something more there than I thought and one night we were at a bar and we were talking to a group at the table next to us and they asked “Are you two together?”. We had just been talking a moment earlier about how it’s bad for friends to hook up and how neither of us would do that if it meant risking our friendship unless there was more to it than sex. But we never finished that conversation and we were both a little drunk. So after they asked the question Rachael didn’t respond and just looked at me and I instinctually said “No we’re just friends.” After that I thought about talking to her more about it when we were sober. However, right before I planned to talk to her the next time I saw her, she told me about some friends from college that had recently confessed their feelings for her, and how much she hates that when a guy acts like a friend just to get close to them.(I Agree) So I said fuck it my feelings aren’t that strong or worth risking our friendship over. So I resolved to move on and even ran scenarios through my head of what happened if she started dating someone. And honestly I thought I felt okay with it.
Fast forward to today, about two months later. She just got back from a trip with family to Florida and we hung out for the first time since, and she told me she hooked up with a guy she knew on that trip. And my stomach fucking dropped and clenched into a massive knot. We spent the rest of the day together like normal and we talked about the hook up what that meant for her and the trip and everything. But since then I have been very jealous. I don’t care about the hook up, that’s whatever. What I am jealous about is that they might start dating. That is tearing me up. I honest to God, on my father’s grave never thought my feelings for this woman were like this. I thought maybe it was an intense crush that was slow to go away but this is way worse. I am angry about it because I only ever wanted to be her friend.
I don’t want to be dishonest about it and I hate the idea of them dating without me saying something. But at the same time I don’t want to hurt our friendship.