Love, friendship, and mostly confusion: advice welcome

Hello forum, I am new and came here looking for an advice about something that crosses the boundaries between love and friendship. It also has to do with the devilish ways of the Internet.

It should really be told as a long, long, long story, but I will try to sum it up as briefly and clearly as I can. I will be here to provide more details if anyone has questions. Please consider that I'm here to seek advice because I'm confused about all this, and this confusion is likely to affect my story as well.

(And also forgive any english mistakes; that's not my native language :-))

As I said elsewhere, I am 40 (from Italy if you want to know) and married to a woman that I do really love and that has been by far the most important and beautiful relationship of my life.

That said, about 20 years ago I fell in love for the first time while I was at the college. She didn't really love me as far as I can tell, but we had an affair that went on about 6 months. At the time she had an official boyfriend which would later become her husband. She never seriously considered walking out on him to engage with me.

I was very deeply in love with her and really went through hell when we finally broke our relationship. I was knocked out for something like 5 years. Yes, I tried to react and forget, flirted with other girls, but every time I met her at the college through the years I would feel the pain again. Over and over.

So... in late 2008 my first love showed up through that devilish facebook thing. It was basically a "just wanted to know how you're doing" thing. We virtually met through Skype and began chatting while at work. It was meant to be a one shot thing, I guess, both in her mind and mine. Yet it didn't go like that. It happened that in those chat I came to know that she was divorced (had been for like 5 years), had a daughter, and that she was recovering from something that happened and that hurted her much. I also came to know that she felt alone and with no one to talk to.

If someone says, "I feel so alone and have no one to talk to", what you usually do is say, "you can talk to me if you want to", and that's what I said. And with Skype and emails etc. we ended up chatting most every day.

From the start, it definitely was a bit confusing for me to chat with the woman I had been loving, and missing, for such a long time in my life. I also felt somehow guilty, not as I was cheating, but yet guilty, and explicitly described the situation to my wife and asked her if it was acceptable for her that I would chat with my old crush to help her through whatever she was going through. My wife is an angel and trusts me. She had no problem at all.

So this kept going on. I understood my friend - will call her R. from now on - had just broke with a man she had had an affair with, and was in full crisis. She felt like she had been wasting her life, having never been able to keep a relationship going, and stuff like that. I tried my best to be close to her and comfort her. Through the months we weaved an ever thicker web of connections between us; began discussing books, then reading the same books at the same time (uh oh), talking on the phone, meeting in real life.

Again: I was confused about my feelings for her. I need to be honest here: I am both physically and emotionally attracted to this person. I think these feeling were carved in my soul so deeply that they will never completely fade. Yet I do love my wife, and I'm honest about this too. Over and over I kept cheking with myself if this relationship with R. was really something about friendship, and I would have given it up immediately had I been sure that it wasn't. The fact that she was clearly in need of help kept me from saying "that's getting too confusing, I'll give up". I should also say that as long as it was something about friendship and I was somehow confident it was, it felt incredibly good to me. I was really happy about this friendship.

Over the time, nevertheless, things changed. She began dating a new guy and feeling better. Her interest in me dropped incredibly quickly. When we talked about it she kept saying that she still cared so much about me and wanted me to be part of her life and stuff, but from a practical point of view, most of our projects of doing-this-and-that together were soon forgotten, we chatted less; we were basically drifting away from each other.

This might sound like a happy ending of sorts, in a sense. Yet two problem arised. First, I missed her. That's my part of fault. I told her I missed her. I began to feel something very close to broken-heartedness. This got me even more confused, of course, and my reaction to these feelings was to decide that it was a good thing to drift apart - painful as it seemed, it was the good thing to do, get over.

Yet, at that time, she began talking about moving to a new house with this new guy she was dating. In through the confusing and complex mix of feelings I had about this, came the idea that it was a terrible mistake she was doing. I knew her well enough to know that, to some extent, she had turned to this guy in an attempt to escape from her fears. I will not go into much detail here, but among other things, her daughter and her date didn't get along very well. It was like she was trying to prove she could build a stable relationship, but in a wrong and fake way.

To sum up, I had the feeling she was still very much in trouble, and this added up to my feelings about missing her. The result was that I didn't feel ready to let her go.

Yet away she went. Over the next months she got even colder and absent-minded in her relationship with me, until we had basically become more acquaintances than actual friends. All the while I was feeling sad about this. And in the end I decided to quit Skype, quit looking for her, and I did. It had all become too painful.

That's today. I haven't been talking to her for about 2 months now. Sooner or later she will show up, possibly, and ask me what happened to me. I don't know what to say if this happens.

I feel staying away from her is good because the situation with her is confusing to me, because it might be dangerous, because I should not feel broken hearted when I am married to a woman I love. Yet I loved her friendship, and miss it. And, I care for her and feel like helping and protecting her, because I have this feeling she's not as ok as she pretends to be. Even if I choose to stay away from her, I'm not sure if I should be explicit about the fact that I do this because it was all too painful, or keep a low profile and try to minimize things and behave as just another distant friend of hers. My mind and heart are being torn apart by all these mixed feelings and needs and I can't choose which way to go.

So..... well......

any suggestions? TIA :-)

I forgot to say, before you ask, that I *did* talk to her about her buying a new house with her boyfriend. She listened carefully and sounded like she thought I was right and she was happy that I told her what I felt. This happened a few months ago. As far as I know, she's not moving to a new house anywhere soon, but I'm not sure if this means she accepted my advice or she's just postponed the decision or what. We didn't talk about it any more (and now we're not talking at all, as you know).