So, me and this girl have know each other for quite a long time, 10 years or so, but I was married when we met, and we didn’t really create a strong connection until a few months after my divorce.
I’ve always thought she was a nice person to hang out with, and really beautiful, but never really gave her any thought in romantic terms, until maybe a couple of months ago.
For context, I live abroad and moved here with my ex right before the pandemic hit, and when I got divorced, about a year and a half ago, I found myself extremely lonely, without many friends and kind of lost. To my surprise, a lot of people I didn’t expect to showed up big time for me, and this girl, let’s call her “E” was one of them. We were never really friends, more like acquaintances because she was my university friends’ friend, but we ended up bonding after my divorce, first over more mundane things, like the fact that she’s been a hockey fan, and cheers for the team from the city I live in (and had been a fan of them since way before I even knew I’d ever move here), our shared passion for some very specific music and cats.
For most of this time, since then, we’ve been good friends, but didn’t really get super close until last December, when I went to visit family in my home country and we hung out a few times. Ever since then we got REALLY close. It started with us facetiming to watch a few hockey games together, but we then started staying on the calls for longer and opening up about very deep and personal topics with each other. Then we started doing this for almost all games, and staying on FaceTime for hours after the games, just talking about life, etc.
We also started texting a lot, like, probably more than anyone else we talk to, and in the past couple of months, a few reels and stories were shared, on both ends, that leave some room for thinking that there might be deeper feelings on both sides.
She also says some really sweet things to me, sends me messages asking about my day, good morning texts sometimes, and I do the same. She’s a very guarded person, and autistic, but whenever we talk about serious stuff, she says she doesn’t feel the need to mask or hide anything, and can just be herself with me, and that I’m the only one she feels like that. This is something that really had my heart melt, especially because she knows all of the bad stuff that happened during my marriage, including all of my mistakes and wrongdoings (no, no cheating or abuse, but I own up to the fact that I wasn’t a great husband and partner to my ex), and yet, she chose to see me for who I am with her, and who I’ve been trying to become after the divorce, and feels safe with me.
She’s also been planning on leaving our home country and moving to my current country, and specifically, my city. She says it’s because she sees here like one of the best options (big enough, but safe and affordable), the university here has a great Master’s program in her field, and because of the hockey team. But I’ve given her advice not to out all her eggs in one basket and think about having other options in the country (despite how much my heart begged me not to). Yet, she’s essentially hellbent in moving to where I live.
I didn’t actually realize how much I’d been slowly falling for her until about a month ago, when I felt REALLY jealous of a fan (she’s a relatively well known actress in our hometown) sending her some chocolates. It was not that “no one can talk to her” jealousy, but more like “If I don’t do something, I might lose this woman to someone else without ever having given it a shot, and the thought of this makes me wanna die”. And ever since I realized it, things have only gotten more intense for me. I’ve tried everything that I can to let her know what I’m feeling without being explicit in how I feel, from sending her cute, kind of romantic reels and messages, to sending her favorite flowers and chocolate, by surprise, after she had a crappy week.
Sometimes I feel like there might be some reciprocity. The way she talks to me, and behaves when we’re on the phone or facetiming, the displays of interest in the little things about my life, the sweet texts or reels/stories. But sometimes it feels like she doesn’t really want anything more than just friendship. I also have a hard time believing that she doesn’t get how I feel from my gestures, but she doesn’t seem to make any concerted effort to reciprocate the same kind of thing, and even the kind of “romantic” reels and messages have become a little less frequent (or I’m overthinking and reading too much, a gift my ADHD and anxiety have blessed me with).
All I know is that this is eating me from the inside, but I’m really scared of making a move and ending up losing her completely, even as a friend. It’s not like I think about her obsessively, or that I’m getting to the point of paralysis because of this, but it’s always there, in the corner of my mind, and sometimes it really takes a hold. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way for anyone, not even when I met my ex wife. I don’t feel any possessiveness, or just flat out lust and infatuation (and that’s not to say that I don’t think she’s the most beautiful woman alive). I just really want to love her, with everything that it entails, the good and bad. I wanna be there when she’s having a hard time, I want to share the good moments, just being around her makes me happy. I am a hopeless romantic (and so is she), and with all that we have in common, not just stuff we like, but values and life goals, I really believe we’d be an amazing match.
I wish I wasn’t so afraid, and my tendency to overthink and get paranoid doesn’t help at all, so I don’t knowwhat I should think.
Please, good people of Reddit, help out a hopeless romantic, unexpectedly in love with the most beautiful and amazing woman he’s ever met