Am I (22M) clinging onto false hope for a future with my (22F) friend?
For context reasons, if Georgia is mentioned, please realize I mean the country, not the US State. Both her and I are half Georgian. Also, this story happens over the course of two years. Also also, burner account on the off chance that she stalks my actual account.
I met this girl two years ago at this point, and from day one, I felt that there was something truly special, different about her. Cliché, I know, but stay with me. I will call her Ana for anonymity sake. I first met Ana at an internship we had together where I took way too long to work up the courage to talk to her, but when I did we hit it off immediately. We instantly began having lunch together instead of with the rest of our coworkers, and got so lost in conversation like we never wanted it to stop.
It started pretty simple, she would always hug me whenever she saw me, which was huge as she never showed affection to any of the other interns, male or female. Her voice would go really high and she’d have the cutest sparkle in her eyes when she said my name. The way your face scrunches whenever you see a baby cat is the same way she would look at me before she embraced me. Of course there was the “I’m so cold, can I have your hoodie?”, but one thing stood out to me more than anything else. There was a point where I had to go to her office, and saw her by chance. The second Ana saw me and her whole demeanor changed. She was all professional and serious until I walked in the room. She immediately dropped what she was doing and turned to me. “Oh my God, OOPPPPPPPP!” as her face scrunched up with a grin from ear to ear. She then genuinely closed a couple meters from her desk to the door where I was, running with her arms outstretched before melting into me. I thought I was completely in the green from that moment forward. I ended up talking to a guy who worked in her office and saw the whole scene play out. He admitted he was extremely jealous of me as he had also developed feelings for her, but hadn’t received an ounce of attention from her, despite her knowing him better than me at that point and spending way more time together due to their proximity in the workspace.
Ana and I have a lot in common, moving around a lot as children, as well as having mixed parents of similar backgrounds. What I mean to say is that we had practically the same childhood down to the TV shows we both watched, which is a reason why I feel like we are so alike, and why we got along so well from first contact. I feel we see eye to eye on practically all subjects, politics, moral values, future goals, et cetera, et cetera.
However, as perfect as the set up seemed, it began getting more and more confusing. The week after the internship had ended, I asked whether she would like to hang out together over the weekend. She took forever to reply, and when she did, she’d blow me off. It went something like this (random dates just as an example):
Friday, January 2
“Hey Ana, are you free to hang out this weekend by any chance?”
“Sorrrryyy, noo I have to focus on [insert something school related].”
Thursday, January 8
“Heyyy Ana just wanted to see if we can check out that place we were both talking about, maybe this Saturday?”
“I’m so so sorry, I really have to [insert something work related].
This went on for an entire month, me asking for weeks in a row if she’d be free that weekend. Until she finally agreed to meet up, but with the added stipulation that she’d bring her friend along, and we wouldn’t go to the place we were raving about for so long. I thought to myself: “Great, she is so not into you. Not only did she blow me off for weeks on end, it isn’t even just the two of us anymore.” Regardless of the circumstances, I thought it’s be a good idea to spend time with her, even if a random friend of hers would tag along. The night played out uneventfully and I grew impatient. Shortly after the hangout we shared, I texted her something on the lines of: “I’m tired of beating around the bush, could I take you on a proper date?” This is where things began to fall apart. She claimed that she wasn’t in the position to date anyone as she was incredibly stressed out due to her academics and family problems. I took it at face value as I felt that they were completely understandable circumstances. However, she then ghosted me for three months. She finally replied with “I’m soo sorry I forgot to reply to this, something I find incredibly hard to believe as this was on instagram and I’d still like her likes, Etc. My friends who I had informed of everything up until this point told me that I should have some self respect for myself, and deleted her completely off of my phone, erasing chats and blocking her. I kept her like that for an additional three months, meaning that we didn’t speak for six months after she ghosted me.
I ended up thinking about it long and hard, and realized I really didn’t have any hate for her, even if she did stop talking to me for a bit with no explanation, so I unblocked her. I ended up texting her asking if she wanted to go to a farmers market together, and within minutes of me sending that text, she said in all caps that she wanted to go. Mind you, not only did she genuinely take days at time to get back to me, this was after we hadn’t spoken for half a year. Long story short, we ended up reconnecting in a big way, hanging out extremely often after that point. We never called them dates, but we would spend so much time together. We walked in the rain together, swam in a lake at midnight, and sometimes just stayed at her place just talking after dinner until 3AM, waking up her roommates. It seemed that she was finally showing me the attention I felt I had worked so hard for.
I’ll go a little quicker to shorten this story. She mentioned that she would be doing a year long exchange/semester abroad program in Norway in only a couple months. I personally am the kind of person that believes that if the person means everything, the distance means nothing, so hearing this news didn’t really faze me. Before she left for Norway, I told her how I felt again, how much she meant to me, all sappy. I thought she’d 1000% reciprocate, especially with how close we had gotten. But no. She said no. I felt so dumb and confused. I felt I had the greenlight all over again when I had apparently been making it all up in my head apparently.
The craziest thing happened when she ended up confessing that she actually did have feelings for me only a few weeks later when I went to her friend for advice on what to do. Her friend said “she totally does have feelings for you, what do you mean she rejected you?”. Essentially she confessed when I confronted her. I was awestruck, confused, but happy. On this call, I asked her if she wanted to put a label on it and try long distance. She seemed really flustered and embarrassed but agreed somewhat timidly. A week later, we call again and she says she talked to all of her friends and each of them had told her that long distance with me was a bad idea. I told her I would wait for her until she got back, but she told me to move on, that she might not even like me by the time she gets back.
We ended up not dating over her year abroad, but here comes the biggest twist. She and I will both be doing our master’s in France starting in the Fall. She’s coming back from Norway in a couple weeks to spend the summer with family. We have explicitly made plans to hang out as well, and I don’t really know what the next step from here is. I really want to talk to her about if she still feels the same. Deep down, I hope that her seeing me and being together in person will rekindle something, spark the fire again. Not to mention that we’ll be in the same country, closing any distance she might have been scared of before. I don’t know how to say it though and I need some advice.
I have to admit that I haven’t felt this way about someone before. I get that we are both young and that we have our whole lives ahead of us, things to experience, people to meet. But I mean it wholeheartedly when I say that I wouldn’t hesitate if she asked me to spend the rest of our lives together. I haven’t met a single person that I feel so confident in saying that. All of my romantic experiences pale in comparison to how sure I feel about her. I don’t know if I believe in soulmates, but if there were such a thing, it might be able to describe the way I feel about her.
TL;DR: Met a girl two years ago and we immediately became extremely close. She showed a lot of affection toward me, but when I first asked her out she rejected me and then ghosted me for months. We eventually reconnected and became even closer, spending tons of one-on-one time together. Right before she left for a year abroad in Norway, I confessed my feelings again and was rejected a second time. A few weeks later, she admitted she actually did have feelings for me, but decided against trying long distance after her friends advised her not to. Now she's coming back in a few weeks, we'll both be starting our master's programs in France this fall, and I'm wondering whether I'm holding onto false hope that something could finally happen between us or if I should move on.