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AwkwardLittleDragon
6,540 M Moving Along 4
PathStep 12 Compassion hearts48 Forum posts4 Forum upvotes1 Current upvotes1 Age GroupAdult Last activeOctober, 2023 Member sinceMay 13, 2018
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Can’t get over my high school crush
Relationship Stress / by AwkwardLittleDragon
Last post
 July 21st, 2023
...See more Okay, well, I say high school crush because we were *in* high school at the time, but I was homeschooled and she went to public school, so we didn’t like, meet or interact in a high school context at all. I met her at church when I moved to a new ward (congregation.) We were in Sunday school together. Her dad would always say hi to me when I came in for early morning seminary on weekdays. Her whole family liked me, really. Parents, older brother, they thought I was a great guy. She liked me too, just… not the way I ended up liking her. I should have gotten the hint, but I didn’t. I wanted to confess my feelings and she wanted to avoid that conversation at all costs, so she was very uncomfortable around me for a couple years while I tried to… I don’t even know what I was doing. At first I wanted to ask if she was interested, but after I realized she wasn’t, I still wanted to tell her how I felt. I’m too embarrassed to go into detail and it’s all a blur anyway, but whenever I was able to have a one-on-one convo with her, either she’d make an excuse to leave, or someone else would swoop in, and when neither of those happened I would freeze up and wouldn’t be able to get the words out. Eventually one day, when I was vague-venting to her friend about freezing up, she just said “Trust me, dude, you don’t need to tell her, she already knows.” So that was that and I was very relieved at the time. I carried a lot of guilt for making her feel uncomfortable, though. I didn’t forgive myself for a long time. But she was still relatively friendly with me, which confused me until a friend of mine pointed out that she probably didn’t blame me and knew I had been doing my best with something I didn’t know how to handle. Well, after about eight years and no one else attracting my attention like she had, I realized I wasn’t over her like I thought I was. My feelings were keeping me from developing serious interest in anyone else. Then at a party, I fell for her all over again, as hard as I had when I was 15. I’m so discouraged. I’m back to seeing her every week at church and sometimes at church activities during the week. My only escape is when one of us is out of town or she doesn’t feel like showing up to the activity, and it’s not much of an escape when I can’t stop thinking about her. I think it’s because I like her family so much. I like my family, but I’ve been realizing how trapped I’ve always felt. I’ve got some pretty serious complex trauma from the way my parents have mishandled my upbringing. I think I latched onto the idea that I could marry into her family and fill the void in my life created by my unsafe familial support system. Of all the people I’ve been interested in, I never had that kind of experience with them. And I probably never will. You don’t usually get to meet people’s families in college unless they bring you home over the summer. Add the fact that nobody’s ever really shown interest in me. I’m not very attractive, and I was an awkward kid growing up. Now my social skills, such as they’ve improved, have gone down the toilet with my declining mental health. So not only am I afraid I’ll never fall in love again, but I don’t even know if it’s possible for anyone to fall in love with *me.* I’m in so much pain. I don’t know what to do.
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