Dear Ryan,

I am sorry that things with your coworker didn’t work out. You did give your best and was very supportive for her, you cooked meals for her and held her in her arms without pushing for anything more. She could feel safe and cared for with you. However, she wasn’t ready for that, and it is, at least partially, because she’s battling her own demons and trying to numb her pain with drugs and alcohol. You saw this very well:

“I’d get bits and pieces of the stressors and traumas that were her life when she was younger, but she always keeps those walls up or uses alcohol to lean on.”

Although your meetings with her were often light and carefree, as you say, she’s carrying a lot of pain inside, which she’s trying to numb with those addictions. She is working with a counselor, so she might be free some day, but not just yet. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why she doesn’t want to get more deeply involved with you – because she knows she isn’t able to give you the love you deserve. Or, she is afraid of another intimate relationship. Or both.

Whatever it is, at least she was honest about her unwillingness to get romantically involved with you. She never gave you false hopes, although it appears she did enjoy your company. But for her, it wasn’t going to happen. It doesn’t make you a less worthy or desirable person, it’s just that this concrete girl refused you. It has nothing to do with you, but with her.

What I am noticing is that you are (at least until this last post where you’re a little bit disillusioned) still showing some of the savior complex, which you talked about before. You said:

“I thought that I could be a good influence in her life, and maybe I was/am?”

“It is my hope that she will continue to distance herself from the “unsavory characters” and the drugs.”

“I feel that I am a positive and calming influence in her life and I would like to continue to be.”

“I’d like to see her live a cleaner life and live up to the potential I see in her”.

You also said she’s an old soul, intrigues you as a person and would like to know her better:

“I would like to know her better than just a work friend that I hang out with. Not in a romantic sense, but I’d hope she’d drop her walls a bit so I can know her better.”

“I’m just not comfortable doing without knowing her better.”

These are all signs that you’re trying to save her. You’d like to know her better, understand her traumas, and be the person who helps her climb out of it. Even if she’s refused a romantic relationship, you still hoped to have an intimate relationship with her, to be a friend who she can confide in and talk about her problems.

But unfortunately, saving others never works. She is the only one who can save herself. She’s probably already working on it, but since she’s still suffering with addiction, it means the wound is deep and she doesn’t know how to cope otherwise.

It’s not your task to help her, moreover she isn’t asking for your help either. She wants to keep things light and playful with you, and now she’s even made inappropriate comments about the repair man, which to me signals she’s putting up a protective shield and wants to distance herself from any intimacy with you. It appears to me that she wants to be left alone with her pain (and her addictions), she doesn’t want you to interfere. It’s not the healthiest choice but it’s her choice, and you can’t do much about it but to respect it and to spare yourself from further pain.

The question I would ask myself if I were you is why you have the need to save her. Usually when we want to save someone, we’re avoiding to look at something in our own psychology that needs to be solved. We’re working hard on changing them instead of looking at what needs to be changed in us.