I feel like I shouldn't be talking about all of this so publicly but I also feel like I need some advice... I'll try and not discuss too many specifics. Okay, so, I have an internet friend who I'm pretty close to, and as is often the way with close friends of mine I've kinda been noticing, pretty much since we became friends but particularly more recently, that I've been starting to have some romantic feelings towards her. And, I mean, this is pretty per the course, so and things she's said have made it clear that she wasn't too keen on relationships in general in the past. Plus, she lives on the other side of the world, and is asexual (whereas I have a strong sex drive so there might be a conflict there), so I just tried to kinda ignore my emotions. Anyway, the other day we were talking and the conversation took an odd turn, and somehow we got onto the topic of relationships. I won't go into details but it amounted to the fact that she'd sorta guessed that I had a slight romantic thing for her. Then, the kicker, that she might also have a slight interest in me - even that maybe in the future, and/or if we weren't separated physically, we might even be able to gave some sort of thing - but also that her romantic attraction wasn't exclusive to me, and also that she didn't really want a relationship right now anyway because of personal reasons. Fact is this is the most interest that anyone has ever shown me romantically ever. Despite the fact that this means that nothing has changed, essentially, in our friend-relationship, it feels like it's changed something for me for definite. It's almost like that slight slither of affection has flipped some switch in me, and whereas before I had a slight on-off infatuation that I was mostly ignoring due to it being seemingly a hopeless cause, now I've felt like I'm being torn apart by my own emotions ever since we had the conversation. We'd talked about how she wouldn't mind if I just dated other people and then maybe left something hanging for the future, but, even if dating other people was something that would be possible for me (it isn't, nobody else has ever liked me even slightly) I now don't know if I even could, or want to. I'm not sure how to deal with this. Any advice?
