Dear Luv Doc,
I messed up and caught feelings for my work friend. Up until August, we only knew each other from Zoom meetings. I always thought she was attractive and intelligent, but I knew she had a boyfriend because she would sometimes talk about him, so I had written her off my list. Once she started working in the office, we began spending a lot more time together and I realized she is the woman of my dreams. She is smart, funny, has a great laugh, beautiful eyes, and is just a really sunny, positive person that everybody loves and wants to be around – except, I guess, her boyfriend, who broke up with her in November. I didn’t even know she was single until a few weeks ago when she started talking about some guy she met playing pickleball and how she was hoping he would ask her out. I was shocked. I said I thought she already had a boyfriend and she said he broke up with her, but she didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to tell her right then that I am in love with her, but I am afraid that after all this time she only sees me as a friend. She seems to prefer this pickleball player anyway. Should I risk ruining our friendship and ask her out? She is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous and way out of my league, but I can’t stop thinking about her.
– Work Friend
Yes. You absolutely should stop thinking about her and ask her out. I know this probably goes without saying, but pickleball matches aren’t won on the sidelines. Well, at least I don’t think they are. To be honest, I am not entirely sure which lines on a pickleball court are the sidelines. I only played one pickleball game in my life during which I injured my already bad knee diving for a kill shot by the front of the net. The injury did not require surgery, thankfully, and the swelling went down after just a few days, but the allergic rash that I got from the hastily purchased Walgreen’s knee brace lasted for weeks. Did I mention I have a latex allergy? Seriously, that’s not a setup for a condom joke. It’s an actual medical condition with a checkbox on forms and whatnot. Anyway, who would think to check for latex as a knee brace ingredient? Not me, apparently.
That said, there is no way I would have been able to badly lose that pickleball match if I hadn’t played. I might be still asking myself: Can I even play pickleball? Or, more importantly: Do I want to play pickleball? Now I know for certain. The answers are, respectively: Yes, no. I’m not trying to say I will never play pickleball again. That would be like saying I am never going to eat another Voodoo doughnut. I’m just saying I am not going out of my way to eat another Voodoo doughnut. If a box magically appears in the office, I might have a nibble. Similarly, if a pickleball court magically appears in my backyard, I might be tempted to test the stability of my right knee. Actually, fuck that. I will be calling code enforcement or maybe my online CBD gummy dealer.
Loving someone who is lovable means that, inevitably, you’re not going to be the only person who loves them.
I bet you’re already way ahead of me on this, but pickleball is a little like love. You’ve got to test out that trick knee every once in a while to see if it still works. The only way to truly know if this girl is way out of your league is to try and get in her league. Hopefully you understand that I am not still talking about pickleball, right? Now, if I was in your situation, I probably wouldn’t go in all guns blazing with plaintive pleas of “I love you,” but something more like, “I know you might only think of me as a friend, but would you like to go out sometime?” A question like that will only ruin your friendship if you let it. You have to be brave enough to accept her answer, even if it leaves you in the friend zone. That doesn’t mean you can’t still love her with all your heart, but it does mean you have to respect her boundaries. Loving someone who is lovable means that, inevitably, you’re not going to be the only person who loves them. They also might not love you back, or if they do, not in the way you want them to. The beautiful thing about life is that you get to love what you want, regardless of whether it loves you back, and that love is the very definition of who you are. So don’t shy away from it. Love hard. Love long. Love well. You will find in time that loving is the very thing that makes you lovable. All right then: Your volley.
This article appears in January 10 • 2025.
