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Dear Katie,

Here’s my dilemma. I’ve become friends with one of my exes and I have no idea how to move it to a romantic thing, or if I even should.  We had a bad breakup and when we reconnected (three years later) we fell into friendship easily but, of course, there was always that tension. Neither of us was single so we kept it just friends, aside from one drunken hookup after which she was pretty adamant about not being ready for anything else but friendship. Anyway, this went on for years — we’re still friends and it’s still tense, but I’ve completely lost the courage to suggest anything beyond that. I’d be humiliated if I got turned down again and I also really like our friendship. So we’re in this lovely (I fucking hate it) just-friends limbo and I don’t want anybody else. My question is how to move this into something else without ruining everything and bruising my ego too badly. Or should I just stick to friendship? Our romantic phase was short but it was mind-blowingly amazing.

– Jennifer B

Dear Jennifer B –

I shouldn’t answer this because I can’t be impartial. I am in the wake of a ‘friendship’ that finally lived as it was — a seismic romance. l know how hard this is; a love that should be but isn’t. It’s the kind of love that makes you seek out psychics, talk to girlfriends and want a lobotomy. 

Here’s the mistake I made. I thought I was crazy. I wasn’t. 

You two aren’t friends and you never were. Risk the humiliation. Tell her you love her. Hold hard onto what you know to be true. For seven years, I was convinced I was making it all up. 

You know only one part of her and she knows only one part of you. You are both busy curating. The covering up, the dissecting, the obsession, it makes you feel alive, right?  You hold each other on a pedestal – it’s fun to fly that high. 

I feel like all my bones are broken from the fall.

I have a few questions for you.

You call the brief romantic phase ‘mind-blowingly amazing.’ If so, why did it end?

Interrogate why you broke up the first time. You probably know the surface reason, but look underneath. The “underneaths” are where the answers are.  Why you broke up the first time will be why you break up the last time. 

A person we suspend in ember can teach us a lot about ourselves. Who are you when you’re with her? What do you like about that person? What do you hate about that person? What embarrassing and feral parts of being you does she make painfully obvious?

Let’s quote my favourite mystic, Jung, “until you make your subconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”  Forgive me for lazily mapping my experience onto yours, but I think there’s something you need to heal. 

I don’t know a “complicated” person who isn’t haunted by an almost. I don’t wish that kind of haunting on anyone. Nothing made less sense than him and me not being together. Why was something I felt so strongly not real? Why do I still feel him right next to me, now that we are so far away?

There are two explanations that still bring me comfort. Maybe they will help you, too.   

A version of you and your friend are together in a universe just left of ours. What’s between you feels so real that you can touch it because, in a quantum way, it is real. In a different understanding of the strings of time, you had past lives together. Apparently in one of ours, I was a very young bride. 

Believe these things if it helps but don’t live with them for too long. The metaphysical is only a cold comfort. 

Here’s my advice: start making actual sense of this. 

You and your friend need to talk honestly about what you are. Let the chips fall. She will want to be with you or she won’t. If you lose her, don’t look at it as a mistake. The mistake is letting it linger, hoping she’ll say what you want her to, analyzing every second, remaining paralyzed. 

Don’t stay too long in the cage of what could be. Trust me, it is easier to live with what is — even with a broken heart.

Katie

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