Me (26F) and this man (43M) work together quite a bit, but probably more so 2 months ago. I’m going to preface this by saying that he is a married man, albeit, is likely to get divorced soon (these are his words, which all I can do is take at face value). I’m based in the London, he’s based in Paris. For a couple of months now I feel like there’s been an air of flirtatious energy. At first I thought it may have been a language barrier thing but as time went on and we had more interactions together, I felt in my gut that it was probably more intentional than that. I’m going going to bullet point a few flirtatious scenarios below:
– He said ‘I can wait to have you’ after I confirmed my work trip to Paris with him.
– Remembering and wishing me a happy birthday outside of work hours (11pm).
– Saying things to me like ‘you’re the best, not that I didn’t already know’.
– He would always say that I’m smart based on my witty comebacks to him.
– He would call me by my nickname that only my family and friends call me (I never said that he could use my nickname, I just told him that I had one).
– Saying to me ‘you elevate my mood every time we chat’ ‘you’re really fun to talk to’.
– He would ping me when we are both working late (around 11pm-1am), just to have conversation with me.
– He saw that I was working late on teams once and just messaged me saying ‘goodnight’ unprompted, even though we were not in the middle of a conversation.
– I cancelled a group call as it fell on New Year’s Day and he messaged me separately saying ‘no call on the 1st’ and I said ‘not unless you fancy working on New Year’s Day but we can catch up on it in the new year’ and he said ‘I’ll miss you though’.
– Noticing small changes in my appearance e.g. I had curly hair one day and he mentioned that the other day my hair looked different and I asked ‘different in a good way or bad way’ and he said ‘It actually looked very good’.
– When I arrived in Paris with another male colleague, the taxi driver said to him that ‘ he had a beautiful woman’ thinking we were together, this story was told as something to laugh about to a bunch of colleagues, including him, but now he separately references the taxi driver’s comment, and mentioned that his comment about me being a beautiful woman was ‘hard to argue with’.
– When I was in the Paris office, one of my clients said I smelled good, I was telling this story to him over lunch as he was the one sitting next to me, to which he then leaned in near my neck to smell me closer, completely unprompted from my side.
– He also asked me if he should start wearing cologne because he knew I was into scents.
– When he visited the London office, we were out and I gave him a hug and commented that he was wearing cologne, to which he replied ‘yeah, i remember you saying you liked it’.
– We were joking over text saying that I was a classy woman, and I said ‘I wasn’t very classy in the uber home when I was drunk.’ And he said to me ‘you seemed composed when I left you, otherwise I would have taken you to my hotel.’
– We were talking about what our necessities were to keep us functioning (it was a lighthearted, humorous conversation). He said his, and he asked me about mine and I said x,x,x and back scratches… he was like ‘physical back scratches?’ I said ‘yes’ and he goes ‘why didn’t you ask back at the bar?’ (as in the bar we were at together for the Christmas do).
– Around this Christmas/ New Year period, he’s been texting me whilst he’s been off work, and not about work related things, just general conversation.
– On New Year’s Eve, at midnight in Paris, he text me saying HNY, and we were texting for an hour, and then he wished me a HNY when it turned midnight here, so it would have then been 1am for him.
The sticker is that he called me today saying that we’ve been talking a lot lately and that he really likes me and that he think I’m funny and extremely smart, and wise beyond my years, but he doesn’t want me to think that he’s coming onto me and that maybe some of the things he says might come across differently because he’s not a ‘native speaker’???? Bearing in mind his English is extremely good and the way he expresses himself with the little expression is arguably more English than native English speakers! He also mentioned he didn’t want to come across as a dick anymore than he already is (wrapping it in humour).
Based on his actions above, and why do you think he has now decided to say this to me, I feel like I’m being absolutely gaslit and he is deflecting big time. I feel like I’m being forced to question my perception of the situation. Is this all in my head?
TLDR: I feel like my colleague is gaslighting me by saying that he’s not coming into me, when his flirty actions (that I’ve bullet pointed) clearly shows the opposite. Is this situation in my head?