Hi,
Long-time MSE’r here but having to post under an alias as, quite frankly, I am ashamed of how I’m feeling right now.
What I’m looking for is some advice as to how to make the pain of falling for someone you can’t have go away.
In September, I started university as a mature (late 20’s) student. There are quite a few of us on the course who are mature students and we all hang out together. Since then my bond with one of the men who is the same age has just grown. Up until January, it was completely a friendship and that was all. I have had many platonic male friends over the years and happily nothing has ever come of it. He is in a long distance relationship. Basically, we have become very close friends and our bond has just continued to grow but to the point where it is no longer just a friendship on my behalf.
I want to state now that I KNOW THAT NOTHING CAN EVER HAPPEN BETWEEN US and I do not intend on ever acting on my feelings for him. I would never ever break up a relationship and even if the feeling was mutual, I know that he is not the type of guy who would cheat (and I’m not the type of girl who could ever be the “other woman”).
If this was any other situation, I would just start completely avoiding him and put some distance between us. However, I have to see him every single weekday and some weekends if we do something social as a group. To make matters worse, even when I try to avoid him he quite often tries to come with me. I’ve started going out at lunch on my own rather than eating in the refectory just to get away from him and my feelings for him.
When he sees me leaving, he asks where I’m going, smiles the most beautiful smile and asks if he can come with me. And I don’t want to be rude, so I say yes and then instead of putting up distance between us, we end up getting closer together and having deeper more meaningful conversations which make us bond even more. He sits next to me in every lecture/seminar/group tutorial/workshop. Over the past couple of weeks he’s started asking me for lifts home (I drive past his house on the way to mine so it seems mean to say no). The harder I try to avoid him, the more he seems to be determined to spend time with me. And the truth is, the biggest part of me adores spending time with him.
The main reason I’ve posted tonight is because after I gave him a lift home this evening, he sat in my car for ages chatting about how hard he is finding the academic side of things and he was quite down. I was being supportive giving him a pep talk. There was a long silence and I wondered why he wasn’t getting out the car. When he finally did, he stopped and turned back around, reached back in the car and squeezed my hand tight before he walked into his house. It was like he wanted to say something but couldn’t. It’s this kind of thing that’s killing me. I have genuinely fallen for him hard and I’ve spent the past three nights in tears because I hate feeling this way for someone I can’t be with and I want it to go away. I also hate the fact that I’m a grown woman feeling and acting like a stupid, miserable teenager.
Sometimes I wonder if he’s just close to me because he misses his girlfriend and I’m some sort of female substitute. She lives in Thailand and he won’t see her in person until the summer when she comes to visit. By that time he won’t have seen her for almost a year. He talks about her all the time to me. Despite this, I can’t help but feel he is being a bit silly/naive. For example, when we are all out in the pub in a group, I keep catching him staring at me. He is never “sexual” or flirty around me in any way but he does quite often hug me in what I’m sure he thinks is a brotherly way but which is making things harder for me. It's getting worse, like the incident in the car I mention above. It’s got to the point where, in every way except the physical, we are acting more like boyfriend and girlfriend and less like friends. Lots of “get a room” type comments are cropping up amongst our peers which, for me at least, are getting harder to laugh off.
I’m determined not to hurt anyone else (i.e him or his girlfriend) but right now, I am hurting. I don't think I've ever felt this way about anyone before. I’m trying hard to make my feelings for him go away but not doing a good job. Any advice I can find says to avoid the person but that isn’t an option given the fact we have no choice but to be in each others company for the course 40 hours a week. Now it’s getting to the point where I feel like isolating myself further from the group socially so I don’t have to see him at weekends/lunchtimes etc.
What can I do? And how can I stop feeling so sad/guilty about my feelings for him? I'd really appreciate any practical suggestions.