Falling in love with a friend.

[Ginsan]

If you are fairly good friends with a girl, and there has never been any suggestion of the possibility of a relationship in the way you interacted, is it bad to develop romantic feelings for your friend? I would like to discuss this not as a psychologist (you) and a patient (me), but as philosophers. I don't want to tell my personal story, I want to talk about whether this is a good or a bad thing, in general. As you will probably say, I should tell her, and I did, she seemed to be cool with it, being the friendly and understanding person that she is. But I still feel bad about it. I feel like an unwritten rule of good friendship has been broken. It makes sense to me for her to think "I thought we were friends. But you fall in love with me?" My inability to give even a single argument for why this would be a bad thing to do makes me seriously doubt whether it makes sense to worry or not. I also have arguments for why it is NOT bad. 1) She looks good and her personality is attractive, it's inevitable. 2) It's completely natural and almost inevitable for a young guy to have these feelings for a young, attractive girl that he's known for almost 4 years. 3) She says she's cool with it, assuming that she is not lying, why do I still care? 4) I'm a lonely person, craving for the company of fun and interesting people, making it much easier to fall in love with someone. 5) I'm a lonely person, and I never see other girls beside her, unattractive family members and another unattractive female friend (excluding the few seconds I interact with a cashier at the supermarket or see a random person on the street), so it makes sense that I fall in love with the only reasonably attractive person that I know. 6) Even though we seem to be good friends, I didn't see her that often, so I might be imagining her personality to be much better than it actually is. 7) I've never had a girlfriend, never kissed a girl, never been on a date, never held a girl's hand (except for handshakes), making it easier to fall in love. 8) I may be imagining the high quality of our friendship, so maybe the unwritten rule never even applied. But still, I feel bad for breaking my own moral rule. I don't know how I got to have this code and I don't even have sensible arguements for it, but still... What do you think? I hope you will say more about this thing in general than about me personally. It's inevitable to some extent, because the context is relevant, but I hope I gave enough context to see it as 2 random people in this particular situation instead of me and my friend. I forgot to mention, I do NOT want to have a relationship with her. For various reasons I will probably never tell you. Just know that I see it as highly unlikely that I will change my mind about this. I see my feelings as a virus. No, seeing the feelings as intruders does not make me feel better about having them.