A bit more drama

I had long suspected my friend R of having more than platonic feelings towards me.

I don’t reciprocate such emotions, but I didn’t know how to address the situation. We speak Serbian together, so anything I would say would lack nuance. But, even if we communicated in English, I still wouldn’t know what to say. An unprompted ‘just so you know, I am not attracted to you’ seems like the height of presumption and rudeness. Is there a way to nip it in the bud?

Last night, I had my prompting to say such things. Over lemonade in Kalemegdan, R told me that he loved me, that he has loved me practically since we met. He even managed to work a few mentions of marriage into this declaration of love. ('Very Austen-esque' was JW’s commentary.)

I told him that he is my friend, that I don’t want to date him. (The thought of marrying anyone at this point in my life is horrifying.) I tried to be as diplomatic and ethical as I could. After I said that I didn’t love him, he suggested I take a month to think it over. Since he had been thinking about telling me this for a month, I should take a month to respond was the thought process. In the abstract, I suppose there is some logic there, in reality: not so much. I told him that I wasn’t going to change my decision, but he insisted, saying I could take even until September if I needed to. I lost the argument; I will be having this same awkward conversation again in July.

After this conversation played out, I made a move to go home. He asked that I stick around for twenty more minutes, as his bus runs infrequently at night. I acquiesced to that small thing; it was an awkward twenty minutes.

It’s hard to talk about movies after a declaration of love.