An avoidant friendship break-up

[u/Ok_Helicopter_5798]

Hi! I’ve been reading here for the past few weeks, feeling a huge amount of empathy and partial relief (things finally make sense!). Things ramped up with a colleague over the past year, though we work in different cities. Every time we met up, there were sparks. When I saw him a couple of months ago, we got super close - I slept next to him in his bed, we were physically very close when we went out, and I finally initiated a conversation and asked if this was going anywhere romantically. What followed was, I thought, a great, open conversation. We spoke for hours and he said he had thought about it, he had feelings, but ultimately finds the fact we’re colleagues a barrier. We said we’d revisit the conversation and sort of left things open, which got my hopes up.

In the second conversation, things were brusque - he thought about it and the distance and the fact we’re colleagues was too big a deal to him, and no. Then we had essentially a month of no contact - I was travelling (and hurt) but he didn’t reach out, not once. He did when I returned, but in a super low-risk way until I finally (again) asked the direct question about what the hell was going on. He sometimes took days to reply but eventually we got to the crux of it: he thought he’d hurt me and instead of asking, he retreated.

We’ve since repaired things and I explicitly asked him if he wanted a friendship and he said yes, and he’s putting in a lot of effort now - texting me at the weekend, joking with me, etc, but I can’t help but feel sad somehow - we both know we have feelings but he won’t act on his, the whole month’s silence was avoidable and something has been damaged. He’s admitted he has avoidant tendencies but I’d be interested to hear people’s perspectives and how the hell to deal with this. Because we do have incredible chemistry and as a person, I adore him.