Can a friendship survive when one person has much more emotional capacity than the other?

I (22M) need some outside perspective on a friendship that’s been confusing me for over a year.

I met a guy (20M) online from another country. We became extremely close. We talk almost every day, share personal things, vent about life, and have been a huge part of each other’s daily routines for a long time.

At some point, I developed feelings for him. He knows I’m gay, and eventually he told me he’s straight. He was respectful about it and never intentionally led me on, but it still hurt. Since then, I’ve tried to figure out how to move past those feelings while keeping the friendship because I genuinely value him as a person.

The issue is that lately I’ve been questioning whether this friendship is actually working for both of us the way it should.

One recurring problem is that when something hurts my feelings, I often feel like it gets dismissed because he genuinely doesn’t see it as a problem. We view certain things very differently. I’ll bring up an issue because it’s bothering me, and the conversation often turns into him explaining why he doesn’t think it’s a problem or why he sees it differently. Sometimes I walk away feeling like my concern never really got addressed because the focus shifts to whether the problem should exist in the first place.

As a result, I often feel like I’m the one who has to adjust my expectations, change my perspective, or learn to be okay with things that bother me. It’s weird because I’m usually the one bringing up the issue, yet somehow I end up being the one who has to do most of the changing.

We’ve also had conversations where he’s told me that his emotional availability and capacity aren’t where mine are right now. He has a lot going on in his life and isn’t able to put in the same level of effort that I do. I understand that, and I don’t think he’s lying or being malicious. The confusing part is that he also says he doesn’t want me to change how I am.

So I end up feeling stuck. If I keep showing up the way I naturally do, I sometimes feel like I’m pouring energy into a black hole and not getting much back. But if I pull back to protect myself, it feels like I’m changing the friendship in a way neither of us wants.

The thing that makes this difficult is that I know he cares about me. We’ve had arguments, periods of distance, and even times where we stopped talking for a while. Yet somehow we always find our way back to each other. We still talk almost every day, and there are a lot of genuinely good parts of this friendship.

What I’m struggling with is whether this dynamic is sustainable.

How do you handle a friendship where one person consistently has more emotional capacity, investment, and effort to give than the other?

How do you tell the difference between someone invalidating your feelings versus simply having a completely different perspective from yours?

And if you’re constantly being told, “I don’t see it as a problem,” what are you supposed to do when it still feels like a problem to you?

I’d especially appreciate hearing from people who have maintained close friendships despite significant emotional mismatches, because right now I feel stuck between accepting things as they are and wondering if I’m asking for too much from someone who means a lot to me.