0:04 I am convinced that people who are attracted to a specific sex cannot be in a platonic friendship with that so called sex. My name is Leo Mian Hilou. I'm 20 years old, I am a University of Guelph student. So I want to talk today about a topic that has affected me my entire life. Something that I was very convinced that I had a very clear outlook on. And as I grew and matured, I very quickly understood that I was wrong. The level of attraction and closeness definitely interferes with just a platonic friendship and therefore it is very, very difficult for females and males to be friends. So in high school, I met a really good guy friend of mine, Tyler. And so we became very close very quickly. In grades nine and 10 it was very platonic, it was just very much a regular friendship. But as we grew older, and we got even closer, and we started spending more, one on one time, I saw his behavior change. It was Valentine's Day, and I had told him that I was going to go see a movie with some friends. And that got canceled and so he phoned me and he said, do you want to go see the movie with me? And I said, sure, no problem. But I made it very, very clear to him, we're going just as friends. He insisted on picking me up, he insisted on buying me flowers. He got very upset when he showed up two minutes late to my house and for the rest of the night, he was very, very grumpy. in a bad mood, I confronted him. And I asked him why he was acting this way. And he said, I take the state very seriously. When he said the word date, it very much had a serious impact on me. And I took a step back, I tried to assess the situation. And I said to him in a really nice way, you know what, Tyler, I'm very sorry, that you thought this was a date, I tried to make it very clear that it was not. But you have to understand that, you know, we are just friends. Even though I made it so very clear that we are just friends, he persisted, and he didn't accept it. And I think that it gets to a point where the, you have to understand that the friendship is lost, and there is no recovering it and there's no going back. Because you're in too deep, and the feelings are too strong. There's a love of friendship and a love of a relationship. And I think that it's very, very important to distinguish the two and understand when you cross that line. And that's when I right away understood, he has now crossed that line. And I started realizing that once I got a boyfriend and prom came around, originally, we were supposed to go as friends. And I had now met someone and we got into an unhealthy relationship and so I decided to stop speaking to him. And I really don't know what is going on with Tyler nowadays. But it just goes to show how quickly and how deeply a friendship can become so much more and how important it is to realize sometimes a friendship will not just stay a friendship. And as much as I was a person to always say that's what it is. I quickly realized that is not the case. And it's something I need to understand and live with. And now I adjust accordingly with friendships with male friends that are straight when it comes to my personal life. You care about someone so much and you have such a great friendship. And then you realize I don't want this to be a friendship anymore. I want this to be more. And that's what happened with Tyler and unfortunately, we couldn't stay friends because it was affecting him in all aspects of his life. 3:48 The first about month or so I was almost terrified to get any sort of connection to any other girl that I don't already have almost starting something new like this person. My name is Mitchell Feinstein, I'm 21 years old am almost to be full time personal trainer and group exercise instructor. My old girlfriends, best friend, if you're staying with me, her best friend, we started talking again online. And we started just kind of chatting seeing how it is going and things started to roll quite naturally. We went to a concert, we had dinner, we went for a walk. And we spent a very, very full night together, we had such a great time we had we bonded so well. And it was very, very quick that we seem to get in such a close connection that I started getting feelings from her. I started feeling things like I didn't want to just be this friends we want I want it to kind of have an emotional and physical connection with her as in a relationship, a girlfriend and a boyfriend relationship. But from her perspective, I don't think it was there just as much. ?During that week, I actually started to talk to her again through the phone and through online like we originally doing trying to get her to try to go on a third date. She did not answer at all, there was absolutely no response. She only said at very first, yeah, I can get back to you. After that time, two weeks have passed, I've noticed on her online Instagram and Facebook page that her status has changed to my boyfriend is better than your boyfriend, signifying that she now has a boyfriend after all this. The main thing that I took away is is against they'll be open. But try to have more open communication. I think we were almost keeping things within ourselves. And we we weren't verbally communicating and we weren't just sharing enough, like share each other's feelings before that quick switch occurs. And that's when the two people might part or things might not mix. Because there may be something there, but the process is bringing it down. You don't know what the other person may be thinking. If you hide it all. Whatever the results may be during that conversation, I think it's completely healthy to to have it regardless. We saw each other twice in person and because of that connection, I have not talked to her since unfortunately.