jul-els

…I’m not sure why. Disclaimer; this is kind of a long story, so here we go. About four years ago, my life went through what felt to me at the time like a major upheaval. My mother broke her hip, I was the only one in our family who cared, and I moved into her home and I took care of her while working full time. A year after my mother’s fall, she passed away and during this time I dated a woman who had a mental illness and she severely verbally and emotionally abused me. My breakup with her coincided with my mothers death and I was left completely devastated by these events. At the same time, I was let go from my job of 20 years due to the pandemic. I was left lost, alone, and in a severe amount of pain. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I went out immediately and got a new job. I worked there for a year, I hated it, and I quit. And I was back in the same spot, not knowing what to do with myself. At this point I decided to do something I had always wanted to do but had never pursued for several reasons; I decided to become a massage therapist. I now love my work, and it’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever done for myself. While in school, I met a woman at an event I was working as an extern, we’ll call her Ann. She’s Vietnamese, has been living in the U.S. for seven years and has been a massage therapist for 20 years. She speaks no English. I was attracted to her on the day I met her, and I got her card from her and booked a massage with her shortly thereafter. I didn’t care about the massage, I just wanted to get to know her better. I started to pursue her, and we went out a few times together. We would speak to each other using google translate. After going out a few times, I told her I was attracted to her. Her response was she said she thought I was cute. Sounded good to me, and reason enough for me to continue seeing her. At this point though, the already challenging language barrier started to break down further. She decided she didn’t want to use google translate to speak to me anymore, because she said she wanted to practice her English. The problem with this for me was that she has no grasp of the language, and when she would speak, it was completely unintelligible. I couldn’t understand any of it. This was definitely going to make it tough to try to get to know each other. I thought maybe I could express my interest in other ways. I would try to show her affection. I would give her my hand, but she wouldn’t receive it. I would try to kiss her, but she would refuse. So I asked her if she was interested in me and I mentioned how she didn’t really show much interest in my attempts to get closer to her. She said yes, but she’s shy and she’s a traditional Vietnamese woman, and I’d have to be patient with her. So I complied to her request and paused any attempts to show affection or warmth. And we continued seeing each other on a semi-regular basis. But I couldn’t find anything out about her. When I would ask her questions about herself she would just ignore it and talk about something else. If I ever said anything fun or flirty to her; same thing; no acknowledgment and just changing the subject. I would try to give her opportunities to get to know me better, and she showed no interest. She would only ever show interest in talking about two things; her work and her sadness. And the two things seemed to be inexplicably intertwined. She lives in a deep state of sadness that seems to be all consuming for her, and it is literally the only thing she expresses an interest in talking about. I would try to be a friend, often helping her with very simple and menial tasks that any functioning adult would be able to execute easily, but she couldn’t due to her language limitations. During all of this there would be times when I’d want to kiss her or show her affection, but I wouldn’t because I didn’t feel like getting rejected. Eventually I graduated from school and entered the field as a working professional. Sometimes she would have jobs that she needed help with and she’d call me and give me work, which was great, since I was new, and I needed all the work I could get. Our friendship went on like this for a year at which point I started to see a shift in her behavior. She started calling me more often, wanting to do more things together, and even gave me a couple of gifts. I took this as a sign that she was warming up to me. On her birthday, I bought her a card and some sweet and simple little gifts and took her to dinner. After dinner I gave her the gifts, and I asked her how she felt about us. She said we were friends and she didn’t want to do anything to ruin the friendship. She said she thought I was “approachable”, but she wanted to let things develop naturally. This made no sense to me since we had known each other for a year and all I knew about her is that she’s Vietnamese, she’s very sad, and that she works far more than she wants to. All she knows about me is that I’m starting a new career and I’m super happy and excited about it. And she knows what the inside of my car and apartment look like. That’s it. *shrug* I told her if she liked me, our friendship could be more, to which she replied, “no, we’re friends”. So I respected her feelings and I was fine with it. I just wanted an honest answer, and she gave me one and that was good enough for me. She then immediately texted me as soon as she got home, saying she was touched by the gifts, that she was sorry for rejecting my interest in dating and that I shouldn’t be sad. I told her I wasn’t sad, I just wanted an honest answer, and that I appreciated that, and that I respected her feelings. She then went on to ask me if she ever got a boyfriend, would I still spend the same amount of time with her, because friends are friends and boyfriends are boyfriends and two people don’t have to be in love in order to go together like that. I asked her why, did she have a boyfriend? She said no. I said if she had a boyfriend, I don’t think she’d be too concerned about how much time I spent with her, because that’s just the way it is when you get serious about someone. And I said, but you don’t have a boyfriend right now and I don’t have a girlfriend, so let’s not worry about it. Over the next couple weeks she started calling me more often and the number of favors she wanted steadily increased to the point that it was becoming unreasonable for me. She was asking for help with simple things that any self sufficient adult could do for themselves and expecting me to arrange my schedule around them. This was too much for me and I felt she was being unreasonable and I pretty much stopped talking to her. I’d had enough and I was tired of trying. It has now been a few weeks and we have stopped talking to each other. Although a part of me misses her, I’m fine with it. It was just too draining and I don’t want to be sad. I want to be happy. Im kind of baffled as to why I wanted her so bad. Because at a certain point, I really did. I guess it was just a physical thing, because I do find her physically attractive. I also thought the fact that we work in the same profession and are both really hard workers were great things to have in common. I also have empathy for her because I was also in that same trap of sadness that she’s currently in. The difference is I found my way out of it. I don’t think she wants to. But whatever the reason is, it was definitely not meant to be. It has now become another closed chapter. Oh well.

No, you’re not being taken advantage of. Nobody will ever do anything to you that you don’t allow them to do. This is what you signed up for.

The feeling isn’t mutual. Accept it and let it go for your own well being and self respect. Holding on to it is just self inflicted torture. Don’t do that to yourself.

Follow your gut. If you’re not comfortable with the way things are going, then you’re not. Don’t get stuck in your head or get overly invested. Keep your options open.

Know yourself, accept yourself, know what you want and listen to that and don’t listen to anybody else. You steer the ship that is your destiny. Stop letting other people take the wheel.

I’m sorry you’re in this pain. Life has pain in store for all of us. It also has joy and pleasure. Life is an illusion inside of a paradox. Even a so called long life is over in a flash in the span of eternity, but we all go through it. I recommend the next thing you do is find help from people who can help you navigate this journey we are all on together. It’s just a ride. You only get to do it once and some beautiful things will come from it along with the painful things. Take the ride. Love to you.

Nice work, congratulations! Enjoy! 😎 🧑‍✈️

It’s sounds like you’re both in agreement that he’s currently unavailable, so I wouldn’t spend more time turning it over in your mind, it doesn’t really matter at this point. Just move on. If he calls you in the future and you’re still interested, great. If not, then life goes on.

As I said, I have no interest in pursuing it. It’s weird at best and borderline creepy at worst. I’m done with online dating altogether. It’s been an unpleasant experience.

A friend of mine who I told about this called it emotional incest. Doesn’t sound too far off to me. Online dating sucks, lol. I was doing it for about three years and all I found were people who were broken, lonely, didn’t know what they wanted, or some combination thereof. I had stopped logging in unless I got a notification. I’m not even going to do that anymore. One of my subscriptions lapsed last month and the other one will do the same next month. I’m done.

It’s kind of a rhetorical question, because I already know what my answer is, and it’s a yes. But I’m curious to see what other people’s opinions (not reactions) might be about it. I recently met this woman online and we went out twice. She seems to have what appears to me to possibly be an unhealthy attachment to her 18 year old son who lives with her. On a recent phone conversation, she told me that her and her son both have locks on their bedroom doors and they each have a key to each other’s room, in addition to their own. She told me that the other night, her son came into her room and wanted to sleep in her bed with her, and she allowed it. She said the next day she asked him why he did that and if anything was wrong and she said his reply was, “no, I just wanted to be near you and to hug you.” I found this to be a bit chilling. Especially when I add it to the fact that I work on weekends, and I’m willing to go out to meet her, but she can’t meet me during the week because she has to be home to cook and clean for her son. Super weird. I’m not going any further with this one. Just wondering what anyone else thinks. I’ve never heard anything like this before.

Digitally is the way people have seem to communicate by and large these days and it is isolating and insulating, imo. The art of communication and socializing in general is degrading because of it. Maybe people will wake up to it and start changing their habits. Or maybe not. Time will tell.

Sounds like you’re highly incompatible. Don’t waste your time. Thank her and move on.

Who knows? No point in analyzing it. An app is just an app. You have to take it at face value and not read anything into it. Otherwise, you can make yourself crazy. She was interested, now she’s not. If she’s interested again, she’ll reach out again. If and when that happens, you can decide if you’re still interested at that time. Don’t torture yourself. Just move on.

…because you’re comparing her to your ex…