I’m questioning whether I ever saw him as a father figure at all
A little over a year and a half ago, I started training martial arts under a 55-year-old instructor (56 now) with a military-style buzz cut and piercing blue eyes that could make you feel his disappointment from across the room with your back turned. He was more masculine than most men I’d been surrounded with at the time, with his own sense of humour most people didn’t seem to get, and we were raised in different cultures (not to mention generations) so I was intimidated by him to say the least.
What I didn’t realize then was that underneath all of that was one of the kindest people I’d ever meet.
A couple weeks after I started, there was an older student who’d always talk to me before class. He never did anything inappropriate, just had poor social awareness in a way that made me uncomfortable. I never said anything and didn’t think I’d shown it, but somehow my instructor noticed.
One day I was crouched tying my shoe while this guy wouldn’t leave me alone, and my instructor stepped between us like a physical barrier, back to me, and calmly told him to leave me alone. Later that week he asked how I felt being partnered with him. When I admitted I’d rather not, his response was basically just, "okay, no question then -- I’m telling him after class he’s no longer welcome here."
There was no hesitation, no second-guessing, no making me justify my discomfort. He just noticed, and acted. Even my own boyfriends had never done that for me. I think that was one of the first things that started the snowball effect of me falling for him.
Three months in, before leaving the dojo for a while, I gave him this whole speech I’d been planning for a month about how I saw him as a father figure. Looking back, I’m not even sure if that was fully true or if my mind just needed a way to explain how attached I’d become.
Now, over a year and a half later, he’s one of the closest people in my life. He drives me home after training since it’s on his route, jokingly calls me his daughter, gives me advice about life and relationships, and has become someone I trust completely. He has six kids and is genuinely the best girl dad I’ve ever met. The “scary instructor” image I had of him disappeared a long time ago. What replaced it was someone warm, protective, funny, and deeply good-hearted. Someone who treats me like family.
During this time I’ve liked other people, and my emotions have fluctuated between looking at him and physically wondering why I ever even found him attractive, while being proved wrong approximately five minutes later when he demonstrates a kick, or a move, or hugs me, and I fall for him all over again.
At first, my feelings were definitely a crush. He was the first person who ever made me feel that kind of intense physical attraction, and at 16-going-on-17, that was terrifying.
I’d like to say it grew into something gentler, but I’d be lying if I said the fire of physical attraction wasn’t still very much there. Now it’s just balanced by something deeper.
I get worked up over every phone call I overhear where his wife’s yelling at him. I get protective when I see his adult kids still treating him as an ATM machine. I want to help when he complains about back pains, and I respect him for always choosing gratitude even after being tired from working two jobs.
I once asked him how to tell the difference between loving someone romantically or platonically, and he said it’s the butterflies in your stomach.
But I don’t get butterflies around him, because this feels different. It’s a safe kind of love that doesn’t require nerves, and the only one I’ve ever felt where I can be fully myself.
I've recently been questioning if I ever saw him as a father figure at all, or if it was just my minds way of finding a loophole where I could be close to him in the only way socially acceptable, and the guilt has been eating me alive.