Dear Sarah:

I didn’t receive your answers to my recent questions, and clearly, what I suggested to you earlier was not helpful. So, I re-read your posts and will be trying to understand better what is happening with you.

This is what you shared: “Guilty of having a crush despite being in a relationship: I was having this weird feeling that maybe he likes me… I feel something really weird inside me because I keep on thinking about him… I am feeling quite bad and this is all tormenting me. I can’t share this with anyone and it’s killing me… indirectly I told him that I have a bf… usually I am not attracted to guys, as I know I got my bf… I also asked casually about his wife.. he said he lives alone…I can’t be vanishing my whole relationship for some baseless ‘crush’… he keeps staring at me all the time and I feel intimidated.. there are.. plenty of handsome and younger guys, I never felt that way before. Because they never behaved that way… I keep thinking about him all day and I am losing focus at work, in studies…

“But the truth somewhere, if I am being honest with myself, is that I am liking him. I wait for his text. I feel so lost and tend to be weird these days… I can’t understand my feelings… as far as I know, I should not be having these feelings for somebody else, and I have known myself to be committed in a relationship no matter what… I feel like suffocating inside, I am forgetting things easily, my mind is just wandering. I can’t concentrate. Worst of all, I keep on crying… I am still wondering how can I be attached to him?”

My understanding: you are suffering, experiencing acute emotional pain and distress. Question is: why? The fast and easy answer, like the title of your thread indicates, is that (1) you feel guilty for having a crush while being in a long-term relationship with a man you plan to marry, feeling that you are a bad person for having these feelings for another man.

Other possible reason in addition to the above, are:  (2) you may be lonely, being away from your boyfriend, it being a long-distance relationship for three years, a long, long time, (3) and/ or you don’t really want to get married to your boyfriend (or to anyone at all) sometime in the next year,

(4) and/ or there is something especially attractive about this man which is responsible for the intensity of your liking him, an intensity you did not experience with men before him: (4-a) it may be the fact that he is significantly older than other men who approached you before; some women are attracted to older men, (4-b) and/ or it may be that he is of a different religion, something that makes him different from other men,  (4-c) and/ or it may be that he keeps staring at you and pursuing you even though he knows that you have a boyfriend, while men before him stopped pursuing you when they knew that you had a boyfriend,

(4-d) and/ or it may be the way he stares at you, a stare that intimidates you, you wrote: “he keeps staring at me all the time and I feel intimidated”- his stare may be a very sexual stare, and he may have awakened a part of you that you repressed all your life, a sexual, daring, defiant part.

This new sexual energy may be what is causing a strong storm of sorts inside you, causing a disturbance, a disorder. Before this man, you had things organized in your brain, like having items neatly organized on shelves. Then this sexual energy/ storm knocked all those items off the shelves and they crashed on the floor, so to speak.

This new sexual energy that created a storm inside you, may be what you described here: “something really weird inside me“, something weird that is causing you to forget things easily, to not be able to concentrate.. a storm that makes you cry, like rain falling during a storm.

anita