Hi again everyone.
First of all I'd like to say thanks to everyone who read my post a few weeks back - your advice & thoughts encouraged me to seek out help, which I've done and I'm working on my issue at current.
I fear, however, I've messed up a bit. I've had feelings for quite a long time for a friend & co-worker, whom I'm very close with. We discuss pretty much everything, films, music, relationships including recently, my admitting some of my issues & past experiences, to which she has been a great help in coming to terms with a lot of things. As I said, I've had feelings for her for a long time, but I've kept things professional and platonic, as we work too closely for this to really be practical (I'm an optometrist, she's the manager of the practice).
She's been with her boyfriend for around ten years, and for the past 7-8 months they've had a really rough patch and are on the verge of breaking up, mostly staying together as they've built their lives around one another & have a mortgage together. We've spent a lot of time talking about this and I've basically just tried to be a friendly ear & shoulder to cry on, refusing to allow my personal feelings to have any kind of bearing on our conversations. Yet the other night, with the addition of quite a few drinks (who'd have thought it?), I ended up kissing her, telling her how I've felt about her for the past two years, thankfully coming to my senses before anything else happened. (If that were ever going to happen given my previous post!)
We've not really talked since, bar some extremely awkward and rather stiff moments at work. Despite how I feel about her, I would not want this to develop into a relationship. It'd be incredibly poorly timed for both of us, I have my stuff going on, she has hers and, even if she felt the same way, she's not the sort of person to leave her partner for another guy, despite how bad things are with them.
My query is thus; What's the best course of action from here-on? I've successfully thrown a spanner into a close friendship and a valuable professional relationship by being a drunk muppet. Beyond speaking to her about it on Tuesday, which is worrying to say the least, I'm not really certain of the best way to proceed. Had it been just a drunken kiss I think it could perhaps have been a "Sorry for being a drunk moron" conversation, but airing my, probably fairly obvious already, feelings to her, I don't quite know if I can just blame that on the booze. One of my bigger regrets being that I don't want her to feel that I've somehow used my knowledge of her failing relationship to almost undermine it, if that makes sense?
Not entirely sure if I'm just massively overthinking this or not.
But any advice, constructive or otherwise is appreciated.
Cheers, J.