Hi there, and thanks for reading this! I'm new to this forum and have a question for you guys and I'd really appreciate it if you had some advice for me. My situation is the following:
About 2 1/2 years ago, I left my university and moved somewhere else. At my university, there was this one professor that I also worked for as a research assistant. I didn't really have a huge crush on him, but besides valuing him because of his mind, intellect and ambition for his field of research, I also thought he was very attractive, funny and nice and I liked him very much. But I never flirted with him, and neither did he with me as he was married, and still is as I suppose.
One day something really stupid happened, and it was my fault. I had taken some erotic pictures for my then boyfriend, and by accident my professor saw them too, at least this is what I suspected after quite a while when I realized I had made them accessible to him by mistake (and absolutely unintentional - it was through a private picture host and I had accidentally emailed the password to my prof instead of my boyfriend - and now don't tell me how stupid I was to upload these pictures anywhere in the first place because I really know that myself by now and could slap myself for doing it, really ). He had not really change his behavior after that, but when I realized what I had done (a few weeks later), I of course deleted all the pictures. From that time on my prof's behavior changed towards me. He got snappy and blamed me for things that went wrong in the department even if they weren't my fault, and as this conicided with me deleting the pictures, I thought this was the reason or at least somehow related to it but of course neither of us mentioned anything about this. It got to a point that on my last day at the department, we even sort of shouted at each other and he slammed the door behind him without saying goodbye or anything at all. That really disappointed me.
About six months later, when I had already moved away, I emailed him for his birthday and we sort of got back to good terms with each other and he even apologized for his behavior and said it was only because he was so stressed with work at this time. Everything seemed to be good again until I made a really stupid mistake. Yes, another really stupid mistake. I don't know what I thought or what kind of evil spirit possessed me to write to him something like that there was something else I would have liked to talk to him about and that he probably knew what it is, and that he could have told me what he wanted because I wouldn't have said no. Yes, this is how stupid I was. Something in my mind, based on assuptions and a feeling of being flattered that he supposedly liked my photos, made me think that ... well I don't think I was thinking. I was only being dumb and stupid. He wrote back that he didn't know what I was talking about and that he didn't want to know what I was talking about, and that was the last thing I had heard of him after I wrote something like "ok, then I won't mention it again". This one email that I wrote in a state of mind that was far beyond anything you could call sane, destroyed my whole professional relationship with this guy, and I really regret being so stupid. I mean, normally I would never go after a married guy, so I really don't know what was wrong with me there.
Well, now, after more than two years, I thought I should give it a try to email him again and try to get back to the status we had before all this mess with the photos had happened. But I don't know how because I feel so stupid and I'm also scared of his reaction if he hears from me again and that he might think again that I was after him. So this is something I would have to make clear right away, but in a way that isn't like "hey you know, I'm not after you", but in a more subtle yet clear way. I hope you know what I mean and that you might have some advice for me on how to approach this. Thanks so much, also for reading through this!