h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Today I learned I was a dumpee. My very best friend, of some five years standing, with whom I work in close proximity, finally 'phoned me and confirmed a horrible suspicion that I had held for some weeks now: apparently, we are to remain 'friends' but in a much more distant way than once we were.

I'm not so sure I find such an arrangement acceptable; how does one retro-fit a platonic friendship? So lovers cannot be friends it seems!

I didn't mean nor wish to fall in love with my 'friend', but I did and I regret that fact above all others. Does anybody know how to stop that happening?

When one makes mistakes in a relationship, as I freely admit I did; apparantly on the ground of inexperience M'lud, one should be severely punished. My mistake, on sensing I was losing something of great value to me, was to overreact: I tried to hold-on and became irrational and "scary" in all the uncertainty.

Pathetic eh? At my age, I should know better!

Which is why I shall heed your well-conditioned advice: to strive to retain whatever dignity I can in such close proximity to the object of my affections, until I can safely and surely move on.

Many thanks. Spleen vented!

Well it's been a couple of months now, the pain has subsided albeit muted by a realisation that my 'friend' was highly disingenuous in her dealings with me.

It appears that her incessant pledges of friendship are more of a smoke screen than genuine attempts to preserve the core of our relationship. I cannot be rid of her because we work together and, in this purgatory, she upbraids me regularly for attaching no more value to our past than to the physical entanglements we once regularly enjoyed.

But her reasoning doesn't stand scrutiny and she still continues to turn her back on me, oblivious to the continuing innocent gestures and invitations that so typified our friendship.

And as for that 'other side' well, I can honestly say that if it exists at all, then it was merely the side of me which finally and no doubt uncomfortably exposed her for what she is.

I'm sorry we wasted our time, Matey!

After 6 years how can you learn to treat someone like a friend and not a lover.
I have found this the hardest thing to come to terms with yet she seems to have no problem in treating me like another friend someone to talk to and tell me her problems when she is upset or lonely.