Who is the culprit: me or the married man who enabled me to develop a crush on him?
Let me be extremely clear that I am not a homewrecker and have never condoned infidelity. This married man is senior to me at work but not my direct boss. We recently worked on a project together for months and had many phone calls for at least an hour, sometimes almost two, nearly all initiated by him. It was mostly about work topics but I noticed that he would sprinkle in sexual innuendos, for example using a clearly sexual slang word to talk about a file. Even if it was supposedly about a work thing, the file, this play on the dirty word did not seem a coincidence. Basically that word is nearly always used in a kinky context. That’s one example of several.
Then his calls were mostly in the evenings, and we even talked on both of our days off (work related but still). A small part of each call would be a personal topic. He started opening up about extremely personal matters including his difficult childhood, large family of many siblings, marriage, his favorite food/drink, mutual hobbies, opinions about our coworkers, many inside jokes. Keep in mind, this man is one of those tough executives who wears the hardest shell so others can’t crack it and get close to him. I’m not sure if he was finding a way to bring up his relationship status so I wouldn’t enable him - if that’s even what he speculated I would do? Or he didn’t trust himself to keep it professional? It was all so strange but he definitely got more relaxed/trusting as time progressed. I guess I could say the same for myself, but I wouldn’t even think of using suggestive language to subtly flirt. With a married man. Which makes it that much harder for me to say: I found myself becoming attracted to some of his qualities, and because qualities are so much of what makes a person who they are, I seemingly became attracted to him. He’s my “type” physically too. Then on our last call for that project, he sounded depressed and said something that was almost heartbreaking. Just think of a line that you’d tell your ex during the waning moments of that last talk. Since then, I’ve sent him a few work related emails which he’s ignored. He did respond to one time-sensitive text. Neither of us have called.
Please be kind and really try to see from my point of view. It hurts to not being able to control my thoughts because I still think about him in a romantic context at times and beat myself up over it with no outlet for this feeling. I won’t act on it obviously, but it’s really frustrating. It feels like I didn’t get closure even after avoiding him for extended amounts of time, and I still have these feelings. What is happening and why? Do you think he started liking me at a superficial level, or actually developed feelings and had to distance himself? Isn’t he largely responsible for me catching feelings? Who is the bigger culprit? Am I so weird/unorthodox to get emotionally attached, or can many of you empathize or at least relate in some way? Does he want me to call him or leave him alone? Or, was he trying to enable me to do more work to make his life easier? Thank you for any advice, input, or empathy!