Should I try to start a relationship with my roommate, who has a FWB?

Hi there, people. Here’s my situation, hopefully I can articulate it well enough…

Let me start off by saying that I have never had a girlfriend, and I’m a virgin, so I’m pretty inexperienced as far as this kind of thing goes. I’m a 19-year-old guy, and my roommate and friend is a girl the same age. We’ve been roommates since the start of the school year. We both attend university in this city, but we come from different hometowns.

We met each other through some mutual friends at the end of this past April, and we really hit it off and connected well. We both thought of each other as really cool people, and I became kind of infatuated with her. I thought she might have felt the same way (though I am bad at judging this), but she left just 2 days later to go live back in her hometown for the summer. We kept in touch through Facebook and chatted a fair bit.

At some point, to my complete surprise, she asked me if I wanted to be her and her best friend’s roommate during the upcoming school year. Of course, I jumped at the chance. Admittedly, I had been thinking about trying to start a relationship with her. She’s beautiful, but more importantly she’s a really cool person, and we get along really well and have a lot in common.

We eventually found a place to rent, and her and her best friend moved in a week or two before I arrived in town at the start of September. The first night I spent at our new place, a mutual friend of ours who’s several years older came over, and she slept with him.

Since then, I’ve found out that they’re not really boyfriend-girlfriend, but they’re basically friends with benefits, and they had been sleeping together since the night she came back into town after the summer. She’s said that they haven’t really thought about what their relationship really is. (She volunteered this information just a few days ago – I didn’t ask her.)

I haven’t been losing sleep over this, but I do still have feelings for her. I’m worried that if I were to tell her how I feel, she would get weirded out and it would damage our friendship, which I really wouldn’t want to lose. I can accept the possibility of her not reciprocating my feelings, but I really don’t want us to stop being friends.

Should I go for it? Should I back off and let everything be and move on? What do you think I should do? Like I said, I have close to zero experience with these kinds of things, so any advice at all is appreciated.