Last year I moved to a foreign country where I knew no one and did not speak the language. I love my new job (the reason I moved here) and I’ve worked really hard to feel at home. Part of that involved joining a church and the church choir which is one of the few places to meet English speakers my age. For the last couple of months I’ve been interested in the conductor of the choir. He arrived in the country a couple of months after me and we are part of the same friendship group ever since. Over the last few weeks we have been spending more time together without our other friends. We have gone out for dinner, gone to a museum and we usually go for a walk together after services and choir. He has been to my house for dinner and boardgames with our group of friends several times over the last few months, and he has twice come alone. I’m 30 and he is a couple of years older. We seem to have quite good chemistry but it has all been very innocent so far - lots of eye contact and casual touching, he put his arm around my shoulder when we sat together after dinner at my house, we held hands as we walked along the peer etc.
Yesterday we met up for drinks at my request. I had planned the evening intending to bring up how I feel. I had assumed he felt the same way because he seems to enjoy spending time with me. To my utter horror, he had absolutely no idea how I felt. He had assumed that we were friends and that we just spent more time together as we are the two newest arrivals in our friendship group. He is completely not interested and I am so embarrassed.
I don’t think he is likely to tell our mutual friends what happened, but some of them have already noticed that we spend a lot of time together and will be able to guess. I feel like I need to leave the choir but I can’t face the thought of trying to start my social life from scratch again. How can I cope with the awkwardness and embarrassment?
This has also been a huge hit to my confidence. I completely misread the situation and I don’t really trust my own judgement at the best of times. I feel so stupid. I think I built this up in my imagination and spent way too much time over-thinking every tiny thing so I ended up thinking it was a sign. I hadn’t realised how small the English-speaking community here is, so there is not much potential for dating because I don’t speak the local language very well yet. I am currently wallowing in self-pity and imagining that I will spend the rest of my life alone. Please help me gain some perspective!