Thank you both for your replies, I do appreciate it. Susie Q, I haven’t ever directly told him how I feel. Very early on in the friendship we had an altercation, after which he sent me a note saying that he valued me deeply as a friend but felt I saw the friendship as something more. He then went on to tell me, which I hadn’t realised when we first became friends, that he had just come out of a “love of his life” 3 year relationship, and the last thing on his mind was another relationship. I denied that I saw it as anything more than a friendship, which wasn’t honest of me, I did it to protect myself I guess from what I saw as humiliating or embarrassing or rejecting. But here we still are, years and years later. We have had our ups and downs in the friendship – spats we call them – but we have always come back to each other and the friendship. I have wondered over the years, there have seemed times when I thought his feelings might have changed, but I guess I was resoundingly put off by what he told me way back, and like your friend, have not had the courage to express my feelings to him, for fear of losing what at times is a most beautiful friendship. I now feel like I just need to look after myself and my own feelings, and move on, I’m pretty certain he now just sees me as a long standing friend, and there are times when I think he sees the friendship as quite casual and not that close at all. I feel like I just need to occupy myself with other things and other people and not even try to go there with whether he may feel differently. I am trying to learn acceptance, which I should have done years ago, and although a part of me wishes I had walked away years ago, I don’t want to regret the good times I have had with him. I am trying now to learn how to find fulfillment from within and from doing other things and spending time with other people, and trying not to notice a gap where I would have preferred him to be. But you have been accurate in picking that I am not that good at expressing what I really feel…..