You hooked up with a friend — perhaps your best friend. Now, you may feel comforted, confused, or even panicked, and that’s perfectly natural. Your friendship will never be the same.

However, quiet that lizard, binary brain that’s thinking of every negative consequence imaginable or that’s fantasizing about your new life of romance as you plot a trajectory toward marriage.

Don’t panic and don’t overreact. Clearly, your friendship has a new complicated layer, but you’re two consenting adults. If humans can progress from the first flight ever to landing on the moon in only about six decades, we can figure this out.

How Do You Feel?

It’s important to assess if romantic feelings are involved after sex with your friend. You may have hooked up under abnormal circumstances, such as a drunken night or as a momentary reprieve from loneliness, and it’s not constructive to feel shame or to blame anyone. If you’re friends, mutual trust and respect likely exist between the two of you.

The essence of your relationship has shifted, so now you must consider if you want to maintain the friendship, keep things going in a “friends with benefits” situation, explore a deeper romance or end the friendship entirely. There’s no right or wrong answer (except “ignore it ever happened” — don’t do that).

It’s also advisable to connect with your wider support system to help assess your feelings and navigate the overall situation.

Communicate

You didn’t have problems talking to each other before you had sex with your friend, right? Don’t start now. Speak openly and honestly about what happened, your emotions and how you feel about the other person. Be prepared to articulate your point of view while respecting and understanding the other person’s boundaries.

For everyone’s sake, go into the conversation without any expectations or assumptions.

In the same way that healthy romantic relationships are built on more than just sex, friendships are the foundation of a meaningful connection between two people. Sex does not have to ruin that relationship.

However, it’s also important to accept the possibility that one of you may no longer want to be friends. You can’t turn back the clock and it’s fair if someone feels sex irreparably damaged the friendship. At the core, this situation is rooted in feelings and feelings are wonderful, brutal and weird.

Story Time: From Benefits to ‘Disgust’

One woman shared her experience in Reddit’s r/sex community about how she had sex with her best friend of over a decade. Before sex, she said her friendship with him was phenomenal. She described him as her “absolute rock whenever I needed him.”

She said they had no intention of forming a romantic relationship but they just wanted to have fun while being single through a friends with benefits situation at first. After a handful of “drunken hookups over the months,” they mutually agreed to stop.

“Fast forward to now and he disgusts me. Suddenly I’m noticing things about his personality that make me cringe,” /u charismatic___enigma wrote. “My whole perspective of our friendship has changed and it bums me out. My best friend of ten years, my absolute rock whenever I needed him, we clicked so well — all ruined because we ended up sleeping together.”

Redditors pointed out that perhaps the OP was projecting some of her own disgust about what happened onto her friend.

“It could be that you’re disgusted with yourself and started projecting these feelings onto him. I doubt he’s changed all that much. Your regret is just coloring your feelings towards the relationship,” /u i_yurt_on_your_face wrote.

Other Redditors suggested that the OP gave herself the “ick” because she may have considered being in a relationship with her best friend and found reasons she didn’t want him as a partner.

“What I think, is that you had to review him as a potential partner before actually saying no to that option, which means you had to ‘find’ things to disqualify him not as a best friend but as a partner,” /u KingTotem wrote. “Now you found new but negative aspects about him as you widened your lens, and that kind of sticks, which leads to your negative perception of him.”

To some, it’s just a simple case of “post-nut clarity.”

In the Reddit post, the OP agreed with many of the assessments from others and seemingly she learned how to approach the situation more mindfully through the help of internet strangers. Hooray!