This is far too long - two posts long - so no worries if it will be not read but I just need it out of my mind and on paper and if anyone can skim or get through it any help would be greatly appreciated. My main questions are summarised in bold at the end of the second post but also bolded in this one.
In brief I am in my thirties and have not been in a relationship before/do not have experience in the bedroom etc so regarding both parts, don't know how to interpret the man's behaviour. On a thread I posted in 90 days a few months ago that I will mention further down, a couple of people thought I had ASD so bear that in mind as a possibility if there is something different about the way I am writing this, but equally maybe I am not writing differently from most other people.
There are a few things I don’t understand. I have been going over this in my head for so long I almost feel disassociated from it. Basically I have known this man about a year and there is a lot of conflicting info and I am confused.
He is early to mid forties.
Earlier thread - he works at a kind of tourism institution I frequented as a visitor. He would heavily flirt with me and in seemingly a meaningful way, divulging all his self criticisms, biography, fears, achievements etc. He also was nervous around me. He also did a few weird things - if I said something objectively neutral he would immediately interpret it as criticism and I would get this look that would kind of shut me down talking or giving opinions, so towards the end of us interacting I was pretty much watching myself to make sure I said agreeable things. Through all this it was clear he was romantically interested in me but after suggesting we continue to chat after the institution closed one evening which I couldn’t agree to because of where I had to be that night, he never asked me out. In the end I gave him my email address and he didn’t contact me, which is when I posted the thread in relationships about 8 months ago, I will link at the bottom of this post.
I returned about a month later and things got weird. I posted in 90 days about this, about 6 months ago, and still have a copy of my original post but not the rest of the thread. He works day shift with lots of people around and rarely nights with just one other person. Firstly there was one incident where I was explaining something to his coworker who I know - something detailed about land deeds that was taking me a couple of minutes to explain - he literally just cut in, like an embarrassed parent, and summarised (wrongly and in a facile incorrect way and a contemptuous voice) what I was saying with ‘she means ’ - I pretended he was right and it was ok but it sort of shocked me as people don’t speak to me like that. After the night shift had ended, to be brief, he started off saying he didn't email me because he had very recently got out of a relationship through work and absolutely would not consider risking his job. I asked what the previous six months had been about and he said, thats just my outgoing personality that you misinterpreted. I was clearly baffled and it eventually emerged he was recording the conversation, because - I’m close friends with a woman higher up in the institution than he is, and he thought I had been sent by her and other women in the institution to set him up and get him fired, that evening. when he established this was not the case, he said that i’d once observed he was cynical, and he was cynical about relationships as well as everything else, but when I suggested we meet to have a conversation about it he gave me his email address - I said look I won't email you if you don't want me to and he told me, if I trusted him and knew him like I said I did, I would email him. I posted in 90 days something like ‘help me understand this man’ and the general consensus was WTF was wrong with me, I needed help understanding myself and why I would put up with this, that is also where two or three people thought I might have ASD.
I didn't email him, but I returned to the institution a couple of weeks later again for a night event. I didn't know he would be there but if I am honest was half hoping he would be. I ended up going for a drink with him and his friend who is his colleague somewhere else and happened to be visiting, and there, he was flirting with the waitress, linking random events conspiratorially (my friend quit the institution for totally unrelated reasons and he though this had something to do with something else that’d happened), he told a story about a woman in the place he works with the friend we were having a drink with, who asked him to move out of a room so she could show some VIPs her work and he talked about writing an article publicising the artists but taking pleasure leaving her out as revenge, he said about her ‘fuck you bitch’ when telling the story; he talked with a kind of reverence about his sister, talking about how she is gay and hates men, and is the scientist in the family (he was sort of showing off about her job) so he can’t compete but will outdo her by having children, and that he was ‘looking for a womb’, at which point his friend asked ‘is that why you go on all these dates’. The men had had two beers each and I had a 1.99 lemonade, and when the waitress came round at the end from the silence it was clear we were splitting the bill, so I paid for my lemonade and then he asked his friend to pay for his beers as he was late making rent. As we left, he said women are manipulators, I said do you think I am a manipulator, he said no, I think I said something that vaguely challenged him then he said he did not want to risk pursuing anything with me as he was involved in a ‘major high profile human rights court case against a former employer’ (the implication I guess being we’d met through the institution and that wouldn't reflect well on him). I just left.
I was not emotionally over it but my head was over it at this point. A couple of weeks later, very randomly, I met someone the night before who also works at this place and gave me the opportunity to attend the only thing I hadn’t yet been able to attend at this place, which happens very late at night after most other events had wrapped up. I really love the institution and know i’d never get the chance again so agreed in principle, knowing I could more or less avoid the part he was working in. I will say I knew he had a shift that night as he’d said the last time I saw him. I turned up and had a great night, but by chance he saw me coming in, and I was all dressed up (first time he would have seen me like that) as I came straight from an important event. I did not go over to his area, but after he had finished he came and found me talking to my friends, and kept coming to talk to me even though I tried to end the conversation a few times and would walk away from him each time. He even said ‘I enjoyed that drink we had last week’ (!) eventually he left because he had to get public transport as his car had broken down, and I just decided to move on and the next week moved hundreds of miles away and more or less processed it and got over it.
At this point I found out from my friend that she thinks he had got fired from a previous job five years ago for I think ‘an inappropriate relationship’. We know the person had the same unusual first name as him, and also that he used to work there, but can’t be sure about that. (This isn’t the employer he’s suing).
Three months later I had to be back in the original town for just one day. For whatever reason, I ended up emailing him and we met up that evening and had dinner and spent the night. Coincidentally I found out from him that evening that the week prior he had contacted my friend, who he used to work with (and suspected of the conspiracy!) and told her to tell me to email him, but I hadn't been in contact with her that week. So, during dinner, there were a lot of things I did like as I was able to properly talk about myself for the first time since knowing him, but a couple of things I didn’t like; I was mentioning height as it pertained to how people think about themselves with reference to a historical figure, and separately mentioned wanting to visit an industrial town for research reasons, and, and he is on the short side for a male in his country, he said ‘why don’t you go to [that town], then you can hang out with all these construction workers, all these nice tall construction workers, and you can go out with them’, said kind of viciously. I was kind of surprised as I am also short and don't give it a second thought, so just brushed it aside. One other thing I wasn’t sure about was in the booth he was like mid way round our semicircular booth with just us in it and I was closer to one side, and three times he told me to get up so he could use the loo, but he could have left the booth the other side it would have been more or less the same distance. Of course that meant every time he came back I had to slide to the end and stand up once again to let him back in. The last time this happened he slid in and brushed ‘himself’ against the back of me, my bottom, if you know what I mean, as he went into the booth, and simultaneously gave me this deep invasive smile like he has done (the smile part) a couple of times before. I have to place this into context as though I am in my thirties I have not really been out with anyone and though I have kissed people have not done much more so I don't know what is normal. It might have been my fault as after I found out he had contacted my friend to try and get me to contact him (he claims he lost my email address), I became more comfortable in the situation and my knee was occasionally touching his of my own volition before he left the booth the last time, or maybe I was standing in such a way that he didn't have room to get in and he thought I meant him to do that. He insisted on paying for the meal, which I know was difficult for him as he literally lives on the breadline.
The other thing that happened was he revealed he has a tumour in his brain that he was diagnosed with a few years ago, and another tumour was removed from elsewhere. I think it is stable although he had treatment to shrink the one in the brain. He also told me about this big court case and he is suing an old employer.
He asked me if I wanted to go back to his house, he asked me before he came back into the booth that last time, but I had said yes, and did feel ok about that still. It sounds naive but I thought we might keep talking. I knew something else might be on the cards but in retrospect it was hard to quantify what that would be if such a thing hasn’t happened before. Anyway, he wanted me to follow his car with my car and was a little put out that I wanted to use my sat nav but anyway I got there by myself. He showed me around the place and showed me some of his artistic work in the spare room. He started talking nervously about the artistic meaning of his work but when I crouched down to get a closer look at it he told me ‘that’s enough critical analysis’ and I felt I had to stand up and we left the room. He made a point of telling me he was locking the door, and I joked was that to keep me from getting out or to stop other people getting in, but it all felt like kind of a rehearsed routine in retrospect; he had his dumbbells out in the living room which seemed staged but I don't know. Because of something I asked him he ended up telling me his dad was an alcoholic who was jealous of him since childhood and never kind to him, and his father used to destroy the house, so he bulked up as a teenager to restrain his father, and he hadn’t had contact with him in a decade. I said that’s got to do a person some damage and he said yes, it made him emotionally unavailable enough to record a conversation, referring to that time. I asked him about his other artistic work, not just his ‘best’ stuff that he showed me, which was to the right of the sofa, and he refused to show me any of it and said he was tired of discussing it. Anyway he kissed me on the sofa, and this is where I am a little confused too and possibly tmi. As it was my first sexual experience beyond kissing, I am not sure what is normal etc. I guess the word is french kissing, his tongue was in my mouth a lot almost immediately and quite deep and strong, and he used his hands a lot, so was squeezing me a lot all over. I have to admit I had a moment - it was very quick, like seconds, from him starting to kiss me to being on top of me - where I suddenly realised how big and strong he was (he is not short relative to me) and I thought ‘I’m in real trouble’ and had the thought he was going to rape me because he was escalating things so quickly and was so strong, but when I stopped things a couple of times and made a half hearted joke about ‘are these your moves’ he was quite happy to pause, but as time went on I supposed I became turned on by what he was doing, and this is where I am confused: I am not sure whether it was him who was actually turning me on or what he was doing, if that makes any sense at all? The thing that unnerved me a bit is he never seemed in the least out of control, or out of breath - he was his same very composed self at all points throughout. At one point when we were taking a pause, he told me he hadn’t had sex in 6 years since his last relationship ended, when I asked why, he said because it wasn’t an important thing to prioritise after he recovered from his tumour treatment 5 years ago. I told him I hadn't done it before, and he said because I was leaving tomorrow it wasn’t a good idea, and I said I agreed. I asked him about his friend saying he went on all these dates, but he said because he was ‘ill and wanted kids, he was kind of choosy’. Because he was squeezing quite hard and also (tmi) smacking, I asked him (genuinely) if he was a sadist but he found that funny and said of course not. He asked why and I said it was because he was strong, he said ‘you’re weak’ quite defensively. Anyway like I say this is tmI but he lifted my top up and did stuff, then put it back down, at this point I was sitting on his lap, but somehow we got to him lying off to the side of me on the sofa again and I said something about preferring him to be on top of me, and he said well he would like to take my top off, and it sounds silly but because he had already lifted it up, I didn’t feel I could say no right at that point so I took it off. Also he told me to take his shirt off, he just kind of told me, so I did. I noticed something on his shirt was also written on a piece of art in the room, and he was really pleased about that, the fact that I'd noticed, but it felt almost like a parent being pleased, and like I had passed some kind of test.
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