He “35M” wrote emotionally loaded letters to me “32F” for 6 months before he told me he was married (mainly because I never asked). It was already too late as I had developed feelings. Now he is claiming he only wanted friendship and I don’t know if I should believe him. Would you cut him off?

I (32f) met a man (35m) over a year ago at a work event we had both travelled to from our respective countries. After a very intense and emotionally-loaded initial conversation (during which I felt like the room emptied out and we were the only ones left there talking), we both acknowledged how wonderful and rare it was to engage with a complete stranger on such a deep level, genuinely wondering if we knew each other from some past we could not remember. He messaged me that same evening asking if he could see me again and so we ended up meeting for a few hours (over a very anodyne coffee and croissant) before we parted ways.

During that second meeting, I felt so comfortable around him that I opened up to him about my personal situation (soon-to-be-divorced mother of a 7 year old son). However (and this is at the root of all the suffering to come), I did not ask him about his personal life. He didn’t volunteer any details either. He was not wearing a ring and only told me that he did not have any children, so I assumed he was single. I also did not probe any further because I was not even mildly interested in a relationship or fling (I was not yet divorced, he lived in a different country, and to be honest he wasn’t even physically my type). I was simply happy to have met someone like him, even if all that was to come out of our bond in the future was a pure platonic friendship.

He hugged me tight that afternoon, looked me in the eyes and said “I have no words to describe this, but you know”, and messaged me again before traveling saying he couldn’t believe how lucky he was to have met someone like me. I felt the same way too and told him so.

Two weeks later, he sent me a first message saying that something he wrote to a friend reminded him of me and that he wanted to share, even though he could not fully explain why. He said it felt deeply instinctive. He then sent me screenshots of conversations that captured painful memories from his past mixed with some nostalgic recollections of our home country (we are both of the same nationality and had left our war-torn country decades ago). His message awakened some parts in me that I had long kept dormant so I ended up writing an even longer message back. I think he was not expecting me to reply the way I did, told me that it made him incredibly happy to receive my message, and with that kicked off what was to become a 6-months-long epistolary relationship that saw us writing long letter-like messages to each other every two to three days. It was beautiful. It was intense. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I ended up falling in love with the uniqueness of our relationship. I ended up falling in love with the density of the writing space we created. And somewhere along the way, I’m afraid I ended up falling in love with him too.

Now I need to clarify here that none of those messages were sexual or flirtatious in nature, but they were heavily emotional and sometimes quite intimate too (drawing on our shared past, our trauma, our hopes, and mostly trying to help each other make it through some very rough patches in our lives). Our letters felt like snapshots of our present and past, but never a full chronological story. Never an account of our days. Never an answer to “how are you” or “what are you up to”. Never mundane. There were no questions asked. No sequence. No reason. No judgement. It was simply me writing whatever came to my mind, and him reciprocating with the same. Almost like an open diary.

Through his writing, I came to know the names of some of his dearest friends, how fond he was of children, where and how he traveled, the books he was reading, the passages that moved him, how he handled (or could not handle) the death of his parents, his sensitivity to violence, and so much more… but never, ever, anything about his personal love life.

I also (very stupidly) did not ask.

I didn’t ask about his love life because it felt petty (given the nature of the things we were discussing), but I also genuinely suspected that he would take my question (are you married/ do you have a girlfriend?) as an offense, to which (I was almost sure) he would reply “How can I be married and write to you the way I do!?”

I asked him a few times (indirectly) if someone in his life would be bothered by the intensity of our conversations or if I was being “too much” in the ways I wrote to him but every time he would only reply by saying that I should write the way I felt like writing and that my messages and our space made him incredibly happy and helped him power through his days.

As our bond grew stronger, he started mentioning how I had become “essential” in his life, how the world would be very ugly without my existence, how he wanted our bond to “flow through everything”, and to become part of the real world (not just the virtual one). He also constantly told me that he admired me, that I impressed him so much, and that it was so rare for him to experience a relationship like ours that it often scared him, that he could not “name it”, and that it felt “unfair”.

This carried on for months, until one night, I just could not take “not knowing” anymore. I just had to find out what his personal real life looked like. So I asked him the question (almost) directly.

(Some days, I wish I didn’t ask. I still have open wounds from his reply, from the blunt coldness of it all.)

“I live with someone I am in love with”, his letter back started. “We are expecting a child together”.

Possibly foreseeing my reaction, he immediately went on to tell me that he would not change a single word or a single feeling in our conversations even if his girlfriend were to read them one day. Apparently, he had told her about us, about how we met, and about the “importance of our bond”. But he also added that he has not showed her our conversations (because the intimacy in there was as much his as it was mine).

As you might imagine, I went into shock for weeks and could not even get myself to reply. I wrote, erased, and rewrote a letter back until I lost track of what I really wanted to say. When I finally did reply, it was to give him a piece of my mind, to tell him that what he did was so unfair, and that even if I never asked him about his personal situation, he should have at least mentioned his girlfriend in some way, in any way, in his letters. He told me things about so many people in his life but he could not have at least once mentioned the most important one, the mother of his future child? There was no excuse for that. That was the end of our story. I was done.

He immediately sent a huge letter apologizing and admitting that he was indeed very maladroit but still insisting he never meant to intentionally keep any information away from me, that he just did not think I would be interested in his love life. He insisted that his intentions were pure and different from what I had imagined them to be (although he did find me “immensely beautiful”, he said, and did wonder a few times who we would have been in a different world or if we had met in a different time). He then begged me to stay and to go on nurturing and growing our bond. He said it would be so sad for us to lose something so powerful and so unique…

As horrible and naive as this might sound, somewhere deep down inside me, I do agree with him on that last point. He would have made such a wonderful and special friend. Almost on a soulmate-like level. If only I had the right information and truth from the start. If only he did not withhold his reality from me. If only I did not allow my imagination to run so wild, my limerence to grow such long legs.

But despite all this, I still cannot get myself to forgive him and I don’t know if I should. He said his girlfriend is okay with our relationship and that he wants to introduce her to me, but if I were his girlfriend, I would be so heartbroken to see the messages between us. Also, I still have deep feelings for him, so it would be very unfair and disrespectful to her for me to go on being friends with him.

I don’t know what to do. I believe he engaged in an emotional affair and then backtracked when I told him off, even though he denies it. I really despise him for leading me on and withholding his relationship from me, but I also cannot bear the idea of him not staying in my life as a friend (even if it will be pure torture, at least initially).

I have nobody I can talk to about this, so any advice or impressions would be much appreciated.

TLDR: I somehow found myself engaging in a 6-months-long intense letter-writing (remote, largely platonic, yet heavily emotional and intimate) relationship with a man I met a couple of times and felt an incredibly strong bond with. All throughout these 6 months, I opened up to him about my personal situation but he never told me he was with someone (and expecting a child!!) until I finally asked him directly (6 months later) but it was already too late. I had fallen very deeply in love with him and had become addicted to our epistolary relationship. We have such a unique bond and while he admits he was maladroit in not mentioning his girlfriend to me and allowing my feelings to grow, he is insisting that he never had any romantic intentions and keeps begging me not to leave his life (suggesting he even introduces me to her) so that we can normalize it all. I am considering trying to get over him but I also feel it would be very painful and unfair to everyone involved (and disrespectful to his girlfriend), as much as I do want him to stay in my life. I am lost and confused and do not know if I should just stop talking to him (and hate him for what he did) or if I should somehow try to turn this into a platonic friendship and enjoy his presence in my life again.