[Sandra181]

It’s a bit long but if you could give me your opinion on it i’d be very grateful !

So here is the story

This guy got interested in me right after we met, he chased me but i wasn’t on a “dating” page yet although i found him very charming already. I needed time but was too stupid to tell him, instead i acted cold. I had no experience… He never told me he had “feelings” at that point but he was around me all the time and asking me out and i was always either refusing or accepting but acting distant (or trying to make other people joing us… I was scared he’d make a move) . I know this is stupid but he made his interest to obvious and too soon for me, I’m very shy and wasn’t ready at all to flirt with him. Thing is, I was falling for him already … He started ignoring me a bit but we eventually talked again to each other and became friends.

There were still clearly flirty/sweet-romantic things in his behavior towards me and my feelings grew a lot as i was getting to know him better & better but none of us straightforwardly “tried” anything concrete or spoke up. I stopped acting as cold : i wasn’t refusing anymore things he’d suggest, we spent more time together etc, and I tried to spend time with him (to initiate), but he never had really direct/clear gestures … more like flirty/ambiguous behavior or words, like trying to touch me, brushing my hand a bit, or my feet under the table, complimenting me, joking about dating, that kind of things … i know you must be thinking it was enough and i should have done something about it but i simply didn’t know how. He was hot & cold and I was scared of being rejected and ruining the nice friendship we were bit by bit building. I never dared either telling him how i felt.

I moved to the other side of the country almost a year after, so we had a “talk” right before where i asked him if he had liked me and why his behavior had seemed ambiguous towards me… I needed to know and to let him know how I felt cause I felt like I had screwed up big time by being so chicken. Sounds clumsy i know, i needed to clear my mind and to get it off my chest. He admitted his feelings, i confessed i had liked him and he said he had the same, but i think he seemed annoyed by me forcing him to speak up like this, or by me doing it so late… I could feel he didn’t want to go into the topic, he was embarrassed, so was I.
After that, he got a bit more distant even though he still seemed to care about me. Things got weird & complicated cause we were both a bit on the “defensive” with each other, sometimes a bit susceptible or disagreeable, really just slightly, but it had never been there before at all. Me cause i was hurt by the fact that he was acting distant (I know it was too late to start anything but I think somehow I was hoping he’d make a move or at least keep on behaving normal with me), him for whatever reason he had. He did on top of that one or two really jerky/hurtful things towards me after i had left and didn’t bother facing it when i tried to confront him with the fact that it was kind of lame (he is kind of immature), he ignored me, simply. I ended up cutting him off, i deleted him from fb to preserve myself (was hurt by his behavior + didn’t want to follow his entire life on facebook, future girl friends included, he wasn’t really talking to me anymore anyways, we were obviously in a weird & unexpected cold).

Anyways, it has been almost over a year now… i saw him only once again since then when i came back to my hometown to visit my grandma: i ran into him at the mall, he acted strange… i had interpreted his “jerky-cowardly” behavior after i had left as disregard, but it didn’t seem like it. I must admit i avoided him a bit at first cause i was afraid of his reaction, I didn’t want to be hurt by him ignoring me. But on the contrary, he looked a bit shy and vulnerable, he looked a bit thrilled and afraid at the same time when he realized I was there. He looked like a little boy, he was trying to catch my eyes a bit (he had a puppy look in his eyes, he looked shy, while I had always known him funny, sarcastic, more confident) but was avoidant at the same time, he seemed honestly stressed out. We finally ended up facing each other. He talked to me, he looked even more emotional and shy than me. He seemed a bit disappointed when i said i was just staying a few more hours (had to catch my plane to go back later that evening). We didn’t talk long at all, we were both in a rush (he had important an appointment), and he didn’t suggest to catch up and hasn’t contacted me again since then either.

I don’t think I still have feelings for him but i regret having lost a friend… do you think i could contact him again, ask how he is doing, or does it look like i should just forget about it cause he probably doesn’t care… (he could have contacted me too after all… he knows he did jerky things and that ignoring me when i was trying to tell him his behavior was a bit lame made it even worse). I know don’t if he hasn’t tried to contact me cause I had cut him off because of his stupid behavior towards me, or because he simply doesn’t care at all and doesn’t want to.
Guys, if you’d have had liked a girl and been good friend with her for a year and you had so brutally cut contact with one another with no proper explanation, would be likely to talk to her again or do you rather just delete girls easily from your mind once they’ve “disappeared” from your life ?
I just regret how things went, he was a nice person and we connected well even on a friendly page, i’d just like us to be in good terms again and try to talk again a bit from time to time. I miss how we got along.

Sorry for all the details… thank you sooo so much if you bothered reading all of this… and thanks in advance for your help !

[April Masini, your AskApril]

I’m not sure how old you both are, but here are a couple of ground rules that should help you make decisions. First of all, men and women can’t be friends. The reason is that one person always wants more than the other at at least one time, and sometimes all the time. This isn’t friendship. It’s one person trying to leverage the friendship into more, and there’s a lack of honesty that’s part of the definition of friendship. So, forget about being friends with him.

Second, you let your fear get in the way of dating someone who may or may not have been your Mr. Right. Facing your fears and really working through them so they don’t block you from healthy relationships is important for now and future relationships. If you want to learn more about this, you should buy and read [b]Think & Date Like A Man[/b], a book I wrote for women that will help you a lot. Here’s the link — it’s an e-book, so you can buy it ($8.99) and download it immediately, and start reading! [url]https://www.askapril.com/relationship-dating-advice/think-and-date-like-a-man.html[/url]

Now, you’re living out of town, so the point of contacting him to start things up, possibly, is lost because of the distance. Even if it worked at first, at best it would be a long distance relationship, and at worst, it would crash and burn shortly after starting up. There’s too much water under the bridge for you to successfully conduct a long distance relationship with him, from what you’ve written. Your idea that you can start up a friendship with him is you pulling the wool over your own eyes — or trying to (I won’t let you! 😉 ). You know that you’re interested in more than friendship, and you want to contact him to see if he’ll date you. Unfortunately, that moment has come and gone.

My advice is that you learn from this experience, read [b]Think & Date Like A Man[/b], and apply it to your life in the area where you’re living now. You may not have gotten that guy, but the experience may teach you how to find love in the future. 🙂

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