@Sammy1

You will not find anyone whilst having unresolved feelings for someone else. The only way of finding out who your person is, is by taking control and asking. – Good point. I don’t really care how it would make me look. I am not procrastinating. 9/10ths of it is me hoping to talk to him at just the right time so that he realises that he is available to have a serious relationship with me. (Even though you are all right – I truly don’t know if it is a good idea or not.) And 1/10^th is the fear you are referring to mixed with the fear of having what is left of my illusion brought to naught.

And Sammy, I brought dreaming715’s thread also because she had been noticing and worrying about the same things as I would be – such as her date not offering here to share food at a restaurant and things like that. Not only intimacy. I am curious if these potential red flags eventually turned out to be real red flags to which she should have paid attention, but convinced herself to overlook because she was already hooked and betting on potential. I could also relate to her ex breaking their engagement (A and I) and her one-sided relationship (her very first post on Tiny Buddha) reminded me of B and myself.

As for the intimacy, I am not sure what exactly you are wondering about. With me, even though I knew I could never physically be intimate with A again (‘could’ as in ‘I physically wouldn’t want to’ and ‘could’ as in ‘life wouldn’t give me a chance to do it’), it took me a long, long time to be able to think about another man that close to me. The guy ‘in-between’ gave the first prod, but it was long after my dates with B and our cuddling that I became able to see myself in the arms of another man again. I remember looking at B on my sofa, being fully aware on the intellectual level that I wanted to hug him and at the same time my body still remembering A’s heat, body and all and not accepting him instead of A. It was half a year after my breakup with A. So give it time, I would say.