Was this emotionally/romantically charged behavior or am I overreading normal friendliness?
I’m a 44-year-old gay man. About a year ago, a 29-year-old guy joined our team at work. He’s married, straight as far as I know, and honestly not even my usual type. But there was something about him that caught my attention. He’s very calm, quiet, self-contained, keeps to himself. Apparently, I was drawn to that. We clicked pretty quickly in a casual way.
At first I thought it was just friendly coworker chemistry, but over time it started feeling more personal than that. He would ask me questions he didn’t ask other colleagues, remember little details about things I said, share personal interests and future plans, compliment my appearance/clothes, and generally seek me out for 1:1 interactions more than anyone else on the team. There was also a lot of sustained eye contact and a kind of “I see you” energy that’s hard to explain unless you’ve experienced it.
At some point during all this, I casually mentioned being gay in conversation. He didn’t react awkwardly or pull away. If anything, his behavior toward me stayed exactly the same afterward, which honestly surprised me because I assumed that if I had misread things, that would have naturally reset the dynamic a bit.
Things also got a little cheeky/flirty when we were alone. Nothing explicit, but definitely different from how he interacted with others. One moment that really stuck with me was after I came back from a long weekend. I casually asked how his weekend was, he answered briefly, smirked and said: “I know you missed me,” then walked away before I could even respond.
What confused me is that I genuinely was not trying to go there mentally. He’s much younger than me, married, and I know better than to entertain fantasies about unavailable straight men at this point in my life. If anything, I kept trying to dismiss it.
Then suddenly the entire dynamic changed. He pulled back hard. Became distant, avoided me, toned everything down to zero. At one point he even implicitly admitted that he had been avoiding me. That part honestly hurt more than I expected because by then I had emotionally vested in the friendship, even if I wasn’t looking for anything to happen.
It took me months to mentally detach and move on from it. Now, almost six months later, I’m noticing the same weird push-pull energy creeping back in again. More attention, more warmth, more oddly personal moments. I’m not in the same emotional place anymore and I have no intention of entertaining an ambiguous situation again.
So I guess my question is:
Am I overreading emotionally intense friendliness, or does this sound like a genuinely charged dynamic that he himself may not fully understand? I’ve never experienced anything like this in 20 years of working life, which is why it threw me so much.