friendship first, please

Unlike a variety of other relationships, friendship requires an acknowledgement by both parties that they are involved or it fails to exist.

One can admire someone who is completely unaware of our admiration, and the integrity of that admiration is not lost; one may even employ someone without knowing who it is specifically one employs; one may be related to a great-aunt whom one has never met (and may fail ever to meet).  And one may,  of course,  fall in love with someone without the beloved being aware of it or reciprocating the love at all.

And in all these cases, the relationships are still what they are, whatever the attitude of the other person in them: they are relationships of admiration, business, family, or love. But friendship is different. 

Friendship uniquely requires mutual self-knowledge and will. It takes  two competent, willing people to be friends. You cannot impose a friendship on someone, although you can impose a crush, a lawsuit, or an obsession.
If friendship is  not reciprocated, it simply ceases to exist or, rather, it never existed in the first place

Love affairs need immense energy, they demand a total commitment and a capacity for pain. Friendship, in contrast, merely needs tending. Although it is alive, a living, breathing thing, and can suffer from neglect, friendship can be left for a while without terrible consequences. Because it is built on the accumulation of past experiences, and not the fickle and vulnerable promise of future ones, it has a sturdiness that love may often lack, and an undemonstrative beauty that love would walk heedlessly past.

Andrew Sullivan