| A
female
age
36-40,
anonymous
writes: OK - this is a long and complicated story, so please bear with me. I worked in the same company with a guy. We worked there for over a year, remotely. That means we didn't meet in real life, until perhaps a year into the time at the company, at a corporate retreat. At the retreat, we really connected. Totally platonic. Fast forward a year later, and it turns out that each of us is consulting on the side and building up our own independent companies. We start talking, and start plotting to join forces and build up our own powerhouse agency (this is the digital marketing space, for context, everything is online). As we continue to plot more and more joining forces and building a company together, we start to (this is all in writing, online) discover so many similarities between us, and specifically in the way that we think and process information. In MBTI language, it is a meeting of two ENTJs. As the months progressed (all of this went down over a period of two months), some drama ensued at our shared workplace. The people there didn't like the fact that we (this guy and I) were consulting and building a company. After a very stressful witch hunt, I and this guy were both fired from the company, for no good reason at all. Through this shared horrendous experience, we both admitted that it bonded us a great deal. We talked, online, more than ever. Conversation veered on the flirtatious, on the slightly (though dubiously) romantic at times. We realized we have a shared interest in so many things, especially long-term backpacking. He began to ask me to travel with him, once we have stabilized our company and could afford to take off.Meanwhile, we had planned a kind of company retreat at his family lake house where, before we were sacked from our former place of employment, we had hoped to bring the company founders there and announce the news and hopefully build a different partnership with them. Since we were fired, yet had already booked flight tickets, the guy and I decided to meet up regardless. For a week, we essentially went on holiday together. We spent 7 glorious days doing absolutely nothing physical, and just spending quality time together, hiking, kayaking, lazying around in the sun, talking until 3 AM each night. Before I go further, there are a few additional important details to share with you. I am legally married, but the marriage is a purely visa marriage, to my best friend. It's totally platonic. I actually told this guy this, because he kept pressing me at various times in our conversations to understand the nature of my marriage. Meanwhile, this guy is single and plasters it all over his facebook. There are all these tell-tale "player" images of him, walking around shirtless, etc, though no photos of other women. At the lake house, I couldn't stand the lack of physicall-ness anymore (not to mention the tension) so I reached over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. As I leaned in, he trembled a bit and looked visibly scared. After the kiss, I told him that I like him very much, and he said nothing back. It was super awkward, and he stammered on something about us making lots of money together with this company. I managed to successfully brush off the awkwardness and we hung out for many more hours that night and laughed on the dock well into 3 AM.Next evening, he got a bit drunk, and revealed to me that he has no interest in being in any relationship at this time, and that for the previous year (he was traveling around the world for a year, with a group of digital nomads) he had a kind of hook up travel girlfriend, whom he had last seen a month before when he was bouncing around California, and with whom he had just broken up for good. He said that he likes his freedom and that he wants to be single for now. He said this while pacing around. Eventually, though, we retreated to the dock again, in the late evening, and he confessed that he finds my "personality very attractive and my body very attractive" and that what's holding him back is just the fear that if we got together, it would somehow compromise our company and our business relationship. Personally, I find this totally silly and laughed it off and assured him that I compartmentalize my feelings vs. my business dealings, and that's not something to be worried about at all. We finished off the night holding each other, and he smelled my hair. Over the next 7 days, he took tons of photos of me (he's a photographer) including some fairly couple-y shots of us on his parents' boat, and we went on what are arguably a bunch of dates. It was all very couple-type activities, except nothing physical happened at all. At night, we would walk around in the darkness of his Tennessee backwoods and link arms and laugh at things and carry on as we normally do.The days went on, in our holiday. I met his parents, who were clearly enamoured with me. They even gave me a house-warming gift (I had just bought a house), and called my freshly purchased house "their house." The guy flew into my hometown with me. He planned to stay there 3-4 days, before flying off to Europe for the next 2-3 months (this was all previously planned before all these events unfolded). He stayed in my freshly purchased house with me and my fake husband for 3 days. In that time, he trompsed around like he owned the place, and called it his home. He also continued to warm himself to me via conversation, but absolutely nothing physical. At this point I had more or less resigned myself to dealing with either a player or with someone extremely slow-moving and reluctant. The reluctance is really obvious. He even said so himself, this fear he has. Well - after 10 glorious days together - the two hours before he was to board his flight to Iceland had arrived. He was out meeting some friends, and I was in my house, with his luggage upstairs. I decided to pry a bit, and found a MASSIVE tube full of Trojan bareskin condoms! I'm talking at least 40-50. I decided to leave one out, as if it fell out, and let him find that. He did, and when he came down from packing, he looked visibly tense. For the final 30 min before he had to go take an Uber to head to the airport, we had a super tense discussion where we never once broached the subject but it was obvious from his body language and tone that he was nervous and desperate about something. He asked me to confirm that our travel plans were still going to happen (we were planning, with gusto, to go on a motorcycle trip across Russia together in about 9 months, a trip that would have taken us over half a year to do). I said that "we'll see" which visibly shook him. He also kept joking about the house being "home" to him and I coldly said that it's strange of him to think of it that way. He joked about him "devirginating" the house with me (he had been on the scene when I saw it for the first time), and I commented sharply that this kind of behavior would not be at all out of character for him. Finally, after 3 really awkward hugs, all initiated by him, and which I totally half-assed back with one arm, he left and drove to the airport. He told me, in the last hug, that he didn't want to leave.On the way to the airport, he wrote me a kind of sappy message, mentioning housewarming gifts, and thanking me for accepting him into his life, and for being his friend. He called himself "sentimental."I wrote back with a really courteous and cordial business message outlining that I've thought a good deal about our personal conversations at the lake house, and that I've concluded that we need to keep our relationship as a business relationship, and absolutely nothing more. He read this message as he boarded his flight for Iceland, and wrote nothing back for 8+ hours (after a 6 hours flight + 2 more hours post-landing). His message back was something very short, like "Totally agree, excited to keep plowing ahead." My fake husband was on the scene when the tense good-bye happened, and he confirmed that the guy looked uneasy and tense. My husband is super bad at reading people, so if even HE saw this, something was definitely going on. Finally - since then, our company is going full steam ahead. These events happened about 5 days ago. Since then the guy wants to keep sending me housewarming gifts, and joked, today, that the room upstairs where he slept is his 'bedroom.' I said to him "Bedroom? Clearly there is some miscommunication." To which he joked some more about renting out the crawlspace for 10$/night, and then buggered off. So - everyone on the internet - what the hell am I dealing with here? A few additional things to reveal are that, prior to use meeting at the lake house, he had written to me that he wanted the two of us to carve our initials into a tree on a small desert island in the middle of the lake in front of his lake house, the same tree where he once carved his initials when he was 9 years old. Well - we did that. Later, when I confessed that I have feelings for him, and mentioned this god-damn tree, he made off like it's not at all tied to romance. He also said that the night I kissed him, after we had said good night and each headed off to our own separate corners of the giant lake house, he had stayed up and written in his journal about me, and tried to process his thoughts. The one takeaway was this sense of confusion on his part, but I'm really not sure.He seems adamant to build long-term plans with me. We have already planned over 2 years worth of trips together all over the world, including sailing around the world. He is 26, and I am 30. The night before he took off for Iceland, I told him that I want to totally scrap any notion of a romantic future with us, and instead build a solid business relationship. This was a very tense and clearly emotional moment for him. This reaction of mine was spurred on by the discovery of the 40 odd condoms in his bag. He told me, today, that he cried in Iceland. We speak to each other in convoluted symbols in text messages.So my question is: what do I do about this guy? What is going on here? Does he have feelings for me? Should I ignore him and move on, and keep this as a purely business relationship?
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male
reader, anonymous, writes (23 July 2018): Get out of the business side with him.
Have been in a very similar situation, and he is making money off your back whilst “ keeping you sweet “ no good will come of any relationship. If you can’t get out if the business - keep it business only until you can or until the relationship gets back on mutual respect.
A
female
reader, anonymous, writes (30 June 2018): Here is my take on it but of course it is my opinion only and i may be wrong. I think he may very well find your attractive and likes you clearly as a friend but he is more interested in being a business partner as he may feel a relationship would ruin that.He may still have feelings for an ex and this puts him off committing because asides from you it doesn't seem that he is interested in any female seriously. He could of course just not want to commit to anyone full stop, he has made it clear to you he doesn't want a relationship with you so really what he does with those condoms i am afraid is his business.I get the impression he knows you like him and while he thinks a lot of you he is not on the same level with his feelings, the fact his parents liked you is irrelevant, if he isn't feeling it he simply isn't.I think this will eventually come to a head because you do want more and if you are planning on spending more time together if he doesn't want the same thing you are going to get more frustrated, because i agree he is giving you mixed signals. All you can really do is ask him for upright honesty on if he simply wants a platonic relationship or more, but whether he gives you that i just don;t know because he may fear losing your friendship and the prospect of a business together and that will fail if you get into something with him he doesn't really want.You know the old saying, don't mix business with pleasure, well here that applies. Personally if i was you i would be thinking long and hard here hwo you want to go forward, because from what you have wrote his heart is not into being with you romantically, if it was it would come naturally. I wouldn't even push for friendship and all this time together if you honestly cannot accept it being just that, because even friendships don't really work in business. If you are serious about this business venture and my gut feeling is that is his primary interest in you then i would keep him at a distance and keep it strictly at that and keep feelings out of it. Best of luck
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