Tdlr: my coworker seemingly had a crush on me, started talking to me daily and never brought up his relationship, despite numerous opportunities to do so. 10 months after our friendship started, he mentions that he has a wife. Why would he continuously flirt with me, never mention her and randomly refer to her today as his wife?
I started a job a little over 10 months ago and started to realize a male coworker was paying a lot of attention to me. He was constantly walking past my work area without a purpose (maybe 50 times a day) and staring at me. I was still learning the job and meeting coworkers, so I didn’t really start to notice until another coworker pointed out that he never came near our work area that often prior to me starting.
After I started noticing it myself, I realized how attractive he actually was and I was curious what he was like as a person. One day, I was leaving for the day and he walked up behind me and made some comment about the weather. He was really smiley, nice and was laughing at every thing I said. Basically displaying the kind of behavior you’d expect when people are interested in each other . After that day, we pretty much talked every day about random stuff, mostly small talk, like weekend/holiday plans etc. Never once did he mention having a partner, although during certain topics, it would be expected that he’d bring her up.
One weekend I went out for lunch and saw him with a woman. When we were walking towards each other, he spotted me and actually tried to duck behind the woman and move out of my line of vision. I found this extremely weird, but from that point on, assumed he was dating someone and respected that. I sat at a table across the restaurant from him and he kept putting his face in his hands as if he was upset. He was also looking at me a lot while sitting with her. After seeing them together, his flirtatious behavior didn’t change. In fact, it seemed like we started talking even more. One day, I saw the woman in the hall and realized she works at the same company as we do!
He switched to a new shift a few months ago and we started talking a bit less. One Friday, we left at the same time and walked through the entire building together talking and laughing. That following Monday, he was acting really odd and going out of his way to avoid me/kind of acting unfriendly. This only lasted for about a week, but we still weren’t talking like we used to.
In the last few weeks, our communication has increased again and we’ve been talking at least once a day, if not more. He’s just as friendly as he used to be, although he seems to prefer to talk to me when we’re alone, rather than around other coworkers. He’ll 9/10 times kind of ignore me when we’re around others, but acts like we’re old friends when it’s just him and I.
Today he told me that he’s going on vacation and I asked what he was going to do. He said “my wife has a conference and I’m just tagging along”. Almost immediately after saying that, his expression changed a bit and he almost looked surprised or worried. My question is: WHY would he wait so long to bring her up? He has never mentioned anything about her and has never referred to her in our hundreds of conversations. Also, I don’t understand why he would look so surprised or worried by something that came out of his own mouth.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Any advice would we appreciated!
ETA: I do want to make it clear that I’m NOT the type of person to go after an unavailable man. After seeing him with the woman that day, I started to be more mindful of my behavior with him. Unfortunately by that point, we had talked so much that I was completely head over heels for him and haven’t been able to get over it. I have, however, tried to keep things totally platonic because I do actually value him as a person, not only in a romantic way.