What a surprise… What to do now?

Funny, I experienced this my first year of college too. I eventually got over it because I realized it was my fault for building up WAY too many expectations in my head before even getting to know the guy.

Well what happened with me was it was my first year of college in a new state too, so I didn't really meet anyone that I grew up with from high school, that was a bummer.

About the... second week of one of my fall classes, I locked eyes with this guy for a good 5 seconds all the way to my seat, it was really obvious and something I never forgot. Later on that fall it was a lot of eye contact, obvious staring, his behaviour would change a lot when we were around etc. I never mosied up the courage to actually talk to him though, so the semester passed and I didn't do anything.

The following semester, spring, it so happens that he has another class only a few doors down from mine and the stare battles began again. At one point he actually even followed me after one of my classes were finished, and it was so intense I didn't know what to do. Anyway, it was obvious something was going on, although I was too painfully nervous to confront it or approach him. Instead I wrote him a note, walked into his class and gave it to him. I know, writing notes in college is lame, but I didn't know what else to do. I just wrote him something along the lines that I remember him from last semester and that I'm just really nervous, something like that.

I thought that would have been a good icebreaker to at least get him to say something. He didn't reply or talk after that and I didn't understand why.

I decided to try a different approach. I knew his name already because we shared a class, and our college has name-specific college-wide emails that if you want to email a student directly you could. So I did that instead. It wasn't super long, I basically said the same thing, and then he finally replied.

He told me that he was sorry and that he should have told me earlier, but that he has a girlfriend that he lives with. He also told me how flattered he was that I liked him though and that he had often times thought about what it would be like to be with me

That definitely put that to rest, although the more I dwealt on it (like you are now) I was still angry at the fact that he to that extent let it carry on for 2 semesters and ended up sending another angry email afterwards. To which he obviously never replied to, but at least I got it off my chest :)

Simply put, you'll get over it. It felt horrible for me as well, but then I realized how ridiculous I was being for playing out fantasies in my head before even really knowing what was going on. We don't realize when we fantasize we're actually creating this alternate reality in our head that at times interferes with the reality in front of us. This is why it makes it hard for us to accept the truth when it doesn't align with our fantasy.

She shouldn't have lead you on and played with you like that, she just liked the attention and probably felt the flirting was harmless. Don't let this one chick ruin your trust toward pursuing someone else, if she's so openly flirty with you this early in her marriage, it's obviously not off to a great start. Just learn from this experience and be bolder next time to ask a girl if she's single or not.

I believe that what you experienced before finding out the unfortunate facts is worth its weight in gold. All things must come to pass, and some pass quicker than others. However, in that short time, you learned to dream again, in a new way. You said you value life and dreams, so that very short time be a lesson to you of the many more ways you can dream! I know this sounds ridiculously "glass half full" right now by me saying this, and I don't necessarily mean it that way, please don't misunderstand. I also have loved someone who was taken and nothing happened from it because of that... but I learned about life and it gave me new hopes that I hadn't discovered before. More things to dream about, more things to aspire to someday.Write about that time and how you felt and what you saw, because that moment exists, intact, in the past. We mustn't confuse our present for our past, but it's always fair game to think about the past, write about the past, and draw from it for the future. I wish you the best of luck.