Why can’t a boyfriend adjust if his girlfriend is becoming close to another boy?

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You can only really be close to a few people. When you’re not close to someone, you measure the time you spend with them in discrete blocks, i.e I spent an hour with my friend Ela the other day.

Ela and I used to work together, we were a lot closer then. When we used to work together, instead of spending particular blocks of time, entire fractions of my free time were spent with her. And when I wasn’t spending time with her, I was thinking about our friendship. Ela and I never became intimate, but we were close for a period of time.

The reality is, getting closer to one person has a direct impact on your relationship with others. Less of your time is spent thinking about your SO.

I have a different close female friend who I’m in the process of distancing myself from. She does not want intimacy or a relationship, and I do, so I have to back off from her so that I can pursue my own life. She doesn’t like that I’m backing off from her, I don’t like that I have to back off, but it is what it is.

I’ve noticed that while guys tend to be very conscious of the tradeoffs they have to make in order to keep close female friends in their lives, women almost never are. I think this comes down to the fact that most women just tend to be a lot more social than most guys. They just don’t think of it as a tradeoff.