TL;DR: work relationship moved into a friendship, and its gotten complicated from there. Intense and don’t know where to draw the line.
I (late 30s M) have a work colleague (late 30s F) who works remotely. We’ve known each other casually about 5 years, and we’ve become closer in the last couple months. About six weeks ago, she visited the office in-person and we started talking more personally, and I was excited to have a new friendship that had some depth. For your information, I’m autistic.
It’s become very complicated because she is married, and she’s developed a crush on me, and says that she’s been having trouble managing her feelings. For me, I do like her and find her attractive, but what I wanted was a platonic friendship.
One part of it is that she will set boundaries — letting me know that she wants a platonic friendship — and then flirt with me. She discloses the ambiguity of her feelings, then tries to work through those feelings with me. What I mean is: I feel like I’m in the space where I’m trying to keep the boundaries she has set *on her behalf*, and then I’m drawn into a spot where I feel pressure to reciprocate her feelings, and then there’s a snap back when she feels like things get too intense and she asks for space.
I find it extremely confusing, and I find I’m becoming guarded in the sense that I don’t really know what to expect in one interaction to the next. I’m finding that there’s an emotional toll coming from wanting a friendship, the intensity coming from her end, and then the hangover when she puts her foot down and asks for space. I feel like I’m just responding to her cues and it’s exhausting.