I had a post mentally ready to go, I don’t remember how it went now, something about how I’ve been watching the Veronica Mars movie (takes place after the end of the TV series) and having a few surprisingly Team Logan dreams—and then I found out that one of my high school friends died this week, of a routine illness. We weren’t close anymore and I had mixed feelings about him, so I feel weird telling you about this because then some of you are going to feel like you should say “Sorry about your friend” and it feels wrong to accept even that degree of sympathy. But we were close back then, and it’s startling to think someone can just DIE like that. Not heart attack, not stroke, not cancer, not old age, but just, like, a virus. It makes it harder to do that human thing humans do, where they self-soothe their Death Fears by victim-blaming: “It’s fine, I’m okay, that can’t happen to ME because I [take care of myself / eat right and exercise / am not fat / get medical care when I need it].” He died because he got sick from a virus and the treatments were not effective and the virus took him down, and that sometimes happens to mortal beings no matter how many magical kale and yoga spells they cast.

The reason my friend and I stopped being close is that he wouldn’t stop pursuing me romantically. At first it was awkward (I didn’t feel that way about him at all) but also cute and flattering: I’d just had a bad break-up with my high school boyfriend, and it was nice to feel as if other guys might like me. And he was a nice, smart, funny guy, and fun to be around, and a great part of that friend group. But then it got distressing when I turned him down and it didn’t stop. He was the stereotypical Nice Guy, who thought I was dating jerks and I should just realize the perfect guy was waiting for me all along—and I was 17-18 years old when this all started, so I was theoretically on board with that narrative and couldn’t figure out why it seemed so icky in practice (answer: because that kind of thing only works when two people like EACH OTHER, not when it’s one-sided). He kept inviting me to go places, implying it was with the group, and then it would turn out to be just him. He would invite me to see a movie just as friends, and then put his arm around me. He’d bring me presents, not MEANING anything by it. I’d get mad and he’d back off, but then when I was like “Whew, now we understand each other and everything’s okay!” and be friendly again, he’d take it as an encouraging sign that this time I was starting to LIKE-like him.

It seems so clear that I should have broken off the friendship entirely over this, but I was young, and I DID like him as a friend, and he was part of a friend group I absolutely didn’t want to leave. Even now it makes me angry and upset to think that in order to get away from HIS inappropriate behavior, I would have had to give up that whole friend group. Meanwhile our friends were saying I should give him a chance: he’s such a great guy! you guys would be so good together! But there was NOTHING THERE except warm, fond, friendship feelings. I knew he was great! But he wasn’t FOR ME.

I was so glad when he finally seemed to hear me on the subject and he moved on and started dating someone else and she was really great for him and they seemed to be getting serious. This was a few years later, when I was in college and dating someone myself. Then when I was home on a break he took me out to lunch and told me that he still had feelings for me and would dump his girlfriend if I said the word. You might think that would be heady stuff, but it made me feel sick, and my heart sank, and I was angry, and it made me think very poorly of him that he would do this to his girlfriend. Also, it didn’t feel as if he really DID like me. It was as if he had some sort of Ideal Girl in mind, and he’d put my face on it, and it wasn’t me at all.

We had another talk in which I tried to explain that it was Never Going To Happen and that I wanted him to stop all this, and he became angry and accused me of “using him.” I couldn’t think of how to explain how wildly that assessment missed the mark, and I thought maybe it would finally end his stupid crush if he believed that about me. We parted on very dicey terms. Then one of his parents died suddenly, and I found out about it from the newspaper and sent him a condolence note, and he responded petulantly that he hadn’t told me about it because he didn’t think I wanted to be that kind of friends. That led to an I-give-up silence of a number of years, and then we became Facebook friends but never interacted directly, and it’s been that way for many years. You can see why you don’t need to say “Sorry about your friend.”

I think what’s hard to work out is that he really did seem like a great guy. It doesn’t seem as if that can be true based on the stories I’m telling about him, but he REALLY DID or else I wouldn’t have kept trying to be friends with him. It seemed as if he just had this ONE glitch and if I could just EXPLAIN things well enough to him… Well. I was happy for him when he finally did get married. I have a lot of good memories of him as a friend from the days before he became problematic. But the fact is that this friendship ended because when I didn’t like him the way he liked me, he first blamed my judgement (she just dates jerks; she can’t see the great guy right in front of her) and then my character (she’s “using me”; she’s not a good friend), and then he used it against me (if she doesn’t like me romantically, she doesn’t get to hear about important things that happen in my life). He was manipulative and petulant and unfair and unreasonable, and he managed to spin that into a narrative where he was doing it out of love for me and I was not appropriately appreciative.

But so much of that could have been chalked up to being really young and stupid and inexperienced and immature. And so many genuinely good guys DO fall for the Nice Guy theory of why a woman doesn’t like them, before they’ve realized they can use mirror-empathy to find another solution (i.e.: “Sometimes a woman likes me but I don’t like her—not because she’s a Nice Girl and guys don’t like Nice Girls, or because I’m an idiot who can’t see true love right in front of my face, or because she needs to work harder or wait longer to make me love her, but because she and I just don’t click; maybe it’s the same way sometimes when I like a woman and she doesn’t like me that way”). So I was kind of hoping that one day I’d get an email from him saying that now that he was older and was in a real relationship and had a good life, he saw the situation more clearly and realized what an idiot he’d been, and was sorry for acting like he thought we were actors in a dumb teen movie. His death means this is never going to happen and I am always going to remember him this way.