To Declare or Not? (long)

[DinsdalePiranha]

*takes deep breath* There's the strong possibility I'm just posting this so I can see it written down rather than asking for advice, but anyway...here goes.

Short, short version: I'm a married man who might be in love with someone else. I say "might" because I'm on medication right now, and it's royally messed up my moods and emotions. I won't be acting on anything until after I'm off the crazy pills and have had a couple of weeks to get back to normal. Well, my version of it at least. Here's what's happened.

About seven months ago a certain woman became a coworker. As far as the work went, she was a rock star. She had been hired as my assistant, and she was great. Everything you'd want in a new hire, and I'm not just saying that because I liked her. She and I worked together very closely and took transit home together after the first week. She was weird to deal with at first, but then I'm weird as well. I should mention that I have a laundry list of personality traits that are generously described as "quirks" and probably more accurately described as assorted symptoms of mental illness, and it's very, very rare to meet someone who "gets" the wavelength I'm on the way she did. This woman quickly became my best friend at work, and for the next few months, everything was fine. We were buddies who understood each other (she has certain mental health issues herself) and had a number of common interests. She liked my sense of humour, I liked hers, and we grew closer. The thing is, of course, I'm married. Just celebrated 14 years last week. She has a boyfriend. She was telling me how she was sure he was the one for her, how she never wanted kids until she met him, she wanted to propose to him, etc etc etc. And it was fine. There was a slight undercurrent of attraction on my end, but we never talked about it. Sometimes, hints of deeper feelings were dropped by one or the other of us, but we both understood that the other was taken and had been for years. At the time, her boyfriend was unemployed as was my wife. This was another area in which we found common ground; getting fed up with our respective significant others being whiny couch spuds. Everything was always professional, but we still liked each other, respected each other and genuinely enjoyed each other's company. She had a boyfriend, I had a wife. So nothing romantic was going to happen. And I told myself that with increasing regularity. Now, my marriage has been a happy, well-adjusted one for the vast, vast majority of the time my wife and I have been together. I mean, you don't stay with someone for a decade and a half if you don't know how to deal with temptation rearing its coiffed head. Or at least you certainly don't stay faithful. I've never cheated on my wife, and I'm as sure as I can possibly be that she's never cheated on me. And that's why I didn't pursue anything outside platonic friendship with this coworker. I was still growing closer to her than I realized, however.

Then, the unthinkable happened. Her useless boyfriend finally got a job. Of course, it's on the other side of the continent. Within the space of about 3 weeks, she packs up and ships out. In the last week we worked together, I finally caved in, accepted the obvious and admitted to myself that I had developed stronger feelings for her than I had been willing to acknowledge. At first I didn't realize it. Then I didn't believe it. Then I didn't want to believe it. Then I actively fought it. And we parted as friends. Good friends, affectionate friends, but just friends. And I was seriously bummed. The day after the last time I saw her, I bought a car. That cheered me up for a while, but my mood quickly deteriorated. (Aside: I didn't buy a car for the hell of it to take my mind off things, I'd been looking for a while and finally made my mind up about which one I wanted to replace the chunk of sh!t I had before, I can't just go: "I wanna buy a car now! Pass me my money bags!" and Hey, Presto! *Car* or anything) I was moping and pining away, but I was surviving. I'd deal. My wife understood I was dealing with the loss of a valued friendship. She *is* married to me and she knows how rare it is that I form emotional attachments, period.

Now, here's the catch. A week after this woman left I started taking medication. I'm in the midst of quitting smoking (again) as I write this, and the only times in the past that I've managed to stay quit before for any length of time came when I was on Zyban (buproprion). So I got another prescription for it. I didn't think anything untoward was going to happen, so I stuck with the dosing schedule this time. There I went, not wanting to smoke into my 40's. This time, I was going to quit.

And ever since I upped the dosage I've been losing my f!cking mind.

I have gone absolutely batsh!t insane about this chick who left town. I don't think I've gone more than 15 minutes in the last 3 weeks without thinking about her. I constantly replay conversations in my head. Every time I think about her with her boyfriend, my head feels like a kettle. My heart skips a beat every time I so much as hear the name of the city she moved to (Toronto, fyi. Guess that's not giving much away). Every song on the radio reminds me of her. I deleted my facebook page just to stop myself from creeping on her profile. Work is so empty and bleak without her. Her shop shirts are still hanging in their stall, and I had to turn them around so I wouldn't see her name and feel like bursting into tears. I totally and completely underestimated the depth of my feelings for her. Sometime when I wasn't looking, I fell in love with her and spent weeks on end trying to tell myself I hadn't. This is Possibility A.

Possibility B: the medication. It's making me crazy. And I mean *crazy*, as in artificial schizophrenia in 2 daily doses crazy. Mood swings of a kind I've only experienced when I was going through puberty or during times of heavy substance abuse. I called in sick one day and spent the morning dreaming or hallucinating or dreaming about hallucinating or maybe even hallucinating about dreaming, I guess I'll never know for sure. Two Fridays ago I actually thought the stapler was talking to me for a few seconds. That might sound funny when you look at it, but when it actually happens to you, it's scary as f!ck. I was at the mall last week, and a woman asked me how I was doing. So I told her. For about 15 solid minutes. It all just came pouring out. I now can't go to the Orange Julius stand in the food court. I honestly have no idea where my emotions end and where the side effects begin.

Such is my dilemma. On one hand, maybe I'm a married man who fell in love with an attached woman who just moved away and I'll probably never see her again. On the other, psychoactive drugs have messed my head up. One side: I have to reevaluate pretty much my whole personal life. When I finally realized I was in love, I realized not only that I haven't felt that kind of passion in my marriage for years but also that I had simply assumed I'd go through the rest of my life never having felt that way again about anyone ever again. It was like a light turning on that suddenly showed me how dark my world had become. With my litany of "problems" it's always been difficult for me to make friends and find girlfriends, and with this woman's absence I was forced to accept that I wasn't a loner and misanthrope entirely by choice. I did crave human contact after all, and I craved her love over everything else. I don't want that light to go off again. I have to make changes in who I am and what I want out of life. Other side: did I mention I thought the stapler was talking to me? And my wife's a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. Not by a longshot. She knows me better than anyone else and she knows that there's a lot more going on in my head than I'm telling her. It also means there's one less mystery of life going on.

We all want to think of love as something grand, mystical and beyond our understanding. The heart wants what it wants, and who knows. But...maybe it's not like that. Maybe a curtain has been drawn back and it's just down to simple chemistry. A few extra molecules of serotonin over here in the limbic system, and *boom* you're in love. A little less, and a dash of acetylcholine on these receptors with a norepinephrine chaser...you're just good friends. Or you think office supplies speak. It means one of the most profoundly deep emotional experiences of my life is down to nothing more than dry science. I'm nothing more than a car with a poorly sealed head gasket. Or a computer that downloaded the wrong update. I'm simply a biological machine, and flesh, blood and bone are no more mystical or special than metal, electricity and silicon. Sentience and romance reduced to algebraic protein metabolism. Love is genetic arithmetic. Which is depressing as hell.

So I guess the question I have to ask is: Ladies, if I still feel I love this woman once I'm off the medication and my head's clear, should I tell her? I've written long screeds in my email account just waiting to be fired off. I'll be honest, some look like William S Burroughs writing love letters to Miley Cyrus.

If you, modern women of LF.net, had a good male friend at work when you were both attached and you moved away, would you want him to come clean and tell you if he secretly held feelings beyond friendship for you? Would you like to smash his head into the wall for not telling you before you left town? Would you call up his wife and tell her to divorce him?

Or would your own secretly nurtured wellspring of uncontrollable lust for this man overwhelm your senses and command you to leave your idiotic clump of a boyfriend, hop on the nearest airliner and return to this male "friend"'s loving embrace?

Am I crazy?

[searock]

No, I wouldn't want a married man to confess his feelings to me. I would want to be left in peace with my boyfriend and to not hear from the married man again.

Those feelings you thought you would never feel again aren't love, they are simply infatuation, and they have been enhanced by your medication. Work on rekindling the fire in your marriage. Talk to your doctor about the side-effects you're having because of the medication you're on.

[DinsdalePiranha]

Today, she told me we were meant to just be good friends.

It's amazing how fast reality snaps back in place around you when you see that.

I don't know about infatuation, but whatever it is, it's definitely being exacerbated by the medication, I'll give you that. Thing is, I've only got about a week left on it, and I can also feel it doing its job of blocking the withdrawal symptoms from quitting smoking.

[searock]

So you did go ahead and inappropriately told her about your "feelings", disrespecting both her and especially your wife in the process.

At least she has some sense. Don't contact her again and do hope that it was just the medication.

[DinsdalePiranha]

Actually, no. I didn't tell her about my "feelings". We've been in contact since she left. We are actually friends after all.

[searock]

No, you aren't friends. You are attracted to her: you cannot be friends. You should cut off contact.

[Valixy]

Even if you think that you have a particular personality and don't often develop deeper feelings for people, what happened to you with this woman is pretty common. It happens every day to many people, going to work, starting a new course, etc. People click extremely well, develop feeling little by little, then they need to part ways. For a while everything feels strange, you can't connect with your life as you used to, you don't enjoy the normal things anymore and really suffer and miss the other one. In time though, a few weeks later maybe, life goes back to normal little by little, you find your old self again and are able to enjoy the little things as you used to - and nothing feels better.

If you give yourself some time and try not to contact her for a while, you will naturally reach this stage of calmness and indifference, when you won't even feel the need to write to her about your feelings because most of these feelings that are dominating you right now will just vanish. It is not love, it's infatuation, it seems to be very deep and overwhelming, but it won't last too long. For this reason, I think that you should not write to her. A month from now on you won't feel this way for her anymore anyway. And in the best possible case, she is going through a similar process, missing her old life and your company maybe, but in a matter of weeks she will be fully concentrated on her new life with her partner and let go naturally some old emotions that don't fit in her new scheme of things anymore.

[4 ratties]

I really hope your seeing a good doctor...
She said she was very happy with her bf and wanted to marry him, I would let her be. You have a good woman at home with u now. Try not to forget that.

[IndiReloaded]

Coworkers are the new source of emotional affairs. It's hard when you are in it, but recognize your attraction to her was b/c she was filling an emotional need not being met by your wife.

Figure out what that need is, and honour your wife and marriage by cutting contact with your former coworker. Work on improving communication with your wife. All the best.