Confused Boy, looking for advice.

Recently I've been coming to terms with my sexuality on a personal level. I am currently going to University, but I've known that I am more attracted to guys than I am girls since I can remember. I've always tried to cover that up, and I've dated many girls and had sexual relationships with girls and enjoyed them. However, I've always felt a stronger physical desire to be with guys. Up until recently, I never thought that I would actually do anything about these desires. But the last few months have taken my idea of myself and flipped it upside down.

I met a boy. It was completely accidental, I randomly chose his name out of a class list from a course I took over the summer and sent him an email asking if he would be able to send me the exam review notes because I had to miss the lecture and didn't know anyone in that class. Someone one email turned into several, and ended with us exchanging numbers and finding out that we were taking similar courses this year. I only had an assumption that he was gay at this point, based on the way he was typing to me through text messages and the way he looked in his social media pictures.

Anyways, this was at the end of the summer. In September, we had been communicating through text messages on and off casually for a week or two, and then we started to sit together in classes and talk a little bit in person and a lot more through texting and other apps. Things slowly started to build between us over the next month or so, until the point where I considered us to be friends. It was around this point that he would start flirting with me in a very casual joking way, because as far as he knew, I was just a friendly straight guy who was down to flirt with him in a fun innocent way that would never actually lead anywhere. The problem is that I am absolutely not straight and I had already found him physically attractive to begin with.

This joking around went on for a few weeks until just before Halloween when I stopped giving silly answers to his requests to fool around, and said that I wanted to, to see how he would react. I'm still not entirely sure if he fully believed me, because the entire time he would send me replies basically saying not to tease him. But he continued to send me invites to go out drinking with his friends, or to come over to his place and hang out. So I started to develop physical feelings for him that I thought could actually go somewhere. I never took him up on any of his offers, and kept coming up with excuses as to why I couldn't do things, etc.

After the Halloween weekend, things were different. He didn't hold back with the flirting as much anymore, and I started to feel more comfortable talking to him in that way. At some point just after all of this, I ended up going to his house a few times and just hanging out. One time to do homework between classes, another time he wanted to take a nap, and I was too afraid to make a move and still was unsure what I was even doing at this point. Because up until here, I had never even hugged another guy, let alone done anything remotely sexual with one, and I had made that incredibly clear. We had a long talk after the "nap" where nothing happened. He was frustrated because he didn't want to just be the guy I fooled around with to figure myself out, and I was frustrated because I was too afraid to make a move.

Long story short, over the next week the text message conversations intensified to the point where he had told me that he was interested in seeing where this would go and I was desperately trying to make myself seem interested so that he thought I was more confident in myself and my sexuality. Alongside all of the sexual talk, we also had a lot of deeper conversations and I really felt like he was starting to open up to me and trust me, because when we first started talking he was very guarded. and when I had warned him about my lack of experience with guys, he warned me that he had been hurt a lot in the past and has a hard time trusting people. So in my mind, we were starting to make a real connection and I was falling harder than I should have.

So anyways, one day I finally managed to go over before class and we were going to study for a quiz we both had that evening after lecture. One thing led to another, and it came time to go to the lecture, but we ended up awkwardly lying on his bed, sort of cuddling. Then it happened. It wasn't much, but we kissed, the first time I had ever kissed another guy, and then things started to heat up a little bit. We made out for a while, our clothes disappeared and we fooled around with each other a little bit. It wasn't the most intense sexual experience ever, but it was a lot for me. Afterwards we realized that we had missed our class, and ran to go write the quiz and didn't really have time to talk about what had just happened.

After class, I said goodbye, went home and felt a wide range of emotions. But mostly, I felt happy. and excited. and just generally good about what had happened, even though it had been a little awkward at times. I was just excited that I had finally done it.

The problem was that he didn't feel the same way. We didn't speak at all that night. Maybe one small text message before bed.

I sent him a message the next day, but the conversation fizzled out almost immediately. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but then after several hours had passed and he still hadn't spoken to me I got a little insecure and anxious. This process went on with me trying to talk about what had happened and him avoiding it completely and shutting down the conversation and dragging out the reply times for several days until I finally caved in and wrote a giant novel of a text message and bombarded him with too many feelings and concerns. I was pissed off and offended. I had my first sexual experience with a guy, who I thought that I had developed a real connection with, to only be ignored for 4 days afterwards to the point where I was questioning myself and whether I had done something wrong.

Mind you, I don't have anyone to talk to about any of this because as far as I know, he is the only person I've ever spoken to about my interest in guys. So I had 4 days of insecurities bottled up inside of me ready to burst. I ended up telling him that I understood if something happened and that he wasn't interested anymore but that I needed him to talk to me because I was having a hard time digesting what had happened and he just disappeared on me. He seemed very disinterested with his replies and I think I freaked him out a little bit with the paragraphs of feelings, but I didn't know what else to do because I didn't know who else to vent to.

So basically, it all resolved with us taking a step back, and him realizing that I had developed real feelings towards him, and him telling me that he had not, but that he was still interested in getting to know me better and seeing if this could be anything for him. This made me angry, but foolishly I accepted it, because it left me with some hope that I wasn't wrong.

And ever since then we've hung out at school in class and studied together and he's just pulled way back from any sort of sexual relationship and has generally just treated me differently and I'm starting to lose hope. I've been trying to keep a level head and stop worrying about this, because if he's being truthful and he really doesn't have feelings for me there's nothing that I can do to change that. I just keep holding on to that feeling I had for him, because it felt like it was a mutual feeling at the time, and I never get like that about people. So I'm currently just living in the world of hope that I wasn't wrong and that he truly is just guarded and hard to break into. I'm texting him right as I type this, but it's not going anywhere, and the frustration is building to the point where I don't want to even try this anymore..

It has gotten to the point where I needed to get some of that off of my chest and ask complete strangers for their perspective. Because right now I know that logically if he tells me that he doesn't have more than just a physical attraction to me, then he probably doesn't. But I'm having a really hard time letting this go, especially becauase of the way he spoke to me before we made the relationship sexual, and also because I know that deep down there has to have been some sort of connection for him too, or else I'm just connected to the idea of him. I don't know. Let me know what you think about all of this. I'm interested to hear other people's opinions. I think for my own mental health I should just drop it and stop talking to him outside of the school/friend zone. But every time I try he says something that gives me hope and I crawl right back in.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate it! Hope some of you can relate to this. Hope to hear from you.