Can you be just friends with someone you are attracted to?

I couldn’t.

I am older, but when I was younger, it was the same here.

History repeats itself over and over, especially with situations like you have described.

It is very hard to be friends with someone you like. It is a path to experience constant hurt.

Yes, I can. However, I get the feeling that I’m the odd one out in this situation. I just seem to be very good at compartmentalizing my feelings.

I think it’s possible. It depends how close I was to the friend to begin with, but if my feelings for them were very strong, I’d rather not spend too much time with them.

I feel that you’ll never be able to push the attraction to the back of your mind and the feelings will inevitably define the way you see your friend. Such a thing risks turning one-sided, with you constantly wanting to hang out all the time with the friend not necessarily being so keen. Usually, in a platonic friendship, I use the way that I feel about my friend as a good gauge for how my friend probably feels about me. If I feel unreciprocated attraction to my friend, of course the usefulness of this gauge flies out the window. I become helpless to read my friend’s thoughts and emotions, hence I potentially let my friend down in a sense.

I feel that the only way you can truly be a decent friend to them is if, over time, the attraction wanes. Till then, you’ll have to keep up the false pretense of just wanting to be friends when you want so much more.

And the jealousy you can feel when a friend you like dates someone else can drive you insane.

Absolutely. The first girl I was ever interested in was never interested in me, but we are friends to this day. She knew perfectly well how I felt, but never let it get in the way of our friendship (which preceded my interest by several years). She never let it get in the way of her life, either. When she started dating someone a little while after I had asked her out, it wasn’t fun. There’s no denying I was jealous. But I got over it, and I got over my romantic feelings for her. After that, it was never a problem again.

I think it would be very difficult, because there will always be an uneasy and unequal feeling between the two people. The only time it has worked for me is when the guy I liked turned out to be gay. Another guy that was straight, but didn’t feel the same way about me was way too painful for me to endure being around him. One guy who fell in love with me, when I made it clear from the get go that I liked him only as a friend, kept holding out hope that I would change my mind. He eventually became so obsessed with me that then he became really unpleasant to be around and he left after starting an ugly argument with me and stopped being friends with me.