u/Emotional-Baker-7569

The reason why my LO and I didn't ever get into a relationship was partly his mixed signals and my inability to be straightforward and confess. We had a friends but not really relationship, we never did anything physical or get close to it, but there was some form of emotional intimacy. I think we were both very avoidant people, so the closest confession that we got from each of us was saying something like "I like when you wear this" and the other person wearing that for a long while afterwards.

I found out he was seeing other girls and distanced myself because I just didn't want to get involved in that. For a year this worked and I was able to distract myself with working on other things.

But 2 years later and he is coming back to my mind even stronger, and it is with the same affection that I had when I first met him.

I feel like every time I distract myself, I feel like I'm running away from facing my feelings for him.

I met my LO when we were young (19) and it's been almost 2 years after then.

From my perspective, I felt that we had attraction from first glance. He was friendly toward me, and I was too, and I started flirting with him.

However, he seemed almost hesitant at times. He would love talking to me and spending time with me and flirting with me, but he seemed hesitant to suggest to me anything that would take us to more than friends.

I chalked that up to him being inexperienced, so that was why I was ok with being in that situation in the first place. And yes, I'm traditional, I usually want the guy to confess. However, I gave him a lot of signals by asking him out, asking for his socials and more. I would say I even made a lot of first moves. So he definitely knew that I was at least somewhat receptive and interested, and I could tell because he didn't seem shy approaching me. However he never did anything to take us to more than friends.

I remember one night that this illusion kind of shattered for me. It was after a night out and we were chatting with friends and he hinted that he had been in previous relationships before. This would have been ok with me in any other circumstance, but it had been a few weeks of us just constantly flirting with each other and me trying to take things further but him sometimes withdrawing and me chalking that to him being shy and inexperienced. When I heard that he had been in relationships before it suddenly felt clear to me: it wasn't that he was shy, he just didn't like me. Because he knows how to act in relationships, and he certainly knew how to get into a relationship.

That was when I started distancing myself away from him, and it turned out to be right to do that because I found out he was seeing other people during that time as well (while I had naively wanted to stay loyal to whatever we had).

However, that doesn't take away from the fact that whatever we had, it felt really genuine in the sense that he genuinely seemed to enjoy spending time with me.

So I don't know. It's been years and it feels very confusing because I know he liked my presence and company and he enjoyed time with me, and he and I could feel the sincerity, but he was also seeing other people at the same time, which probably explains why he didn't want us to be more than friends.