Need some more help brothers.. · Brotherhood Of Scent

Need some more help brothers..

Well boys, your favorite lover boy just pulled a huge risk… he caught feelings for someone in the fragrance world. 😭

I don’t want to go into too much identifying detail, because this involves another person and I don’t want to put her business out there. But I could use some advice from the older gentlemen here.

I met this woman through fragrance and over several conversations, we ended up talking for hours. We had a surprising amount in common, shared interests, similar ways of looking at things, and honestly just had really good chemistry. It was one of the most natural connections I’d had with someone in a long time.

Naturally, I caught a crush.

The problem was that I couldn’t figure out what the relationship actually was.

In person, it was warm, genuine, and incredibly easy. Outside of those interactions, communication was basically nonexistent. I’d invited her to do something outside the usual setting, she seemed receptive, but nothing ever materialized. I tried not to push because I didn’t want to make myself too much of a priority in someone’s life.

Then I’d see her again and we’d immediately fall back into these long, meaningful conversations.

She’d say things that made me think she genuinely enjoyed having me around and would encourage me to visit more.

So I was stuck asking myself:

How much do I invest in this?

I wasn’t demanding romance. I wasn’t expecting her to owe me anything. I just wanted enough clarity to know whether I should treat this as a friendship, a casual acquaintance, or something that might eventually develop.

Eventually I tried reaching out again, and after getting very little response, I tried to catch her in person because I thought an honest conversation would be better than trying to interpret everything through texts.

That didn’t really happen.

When I finally saw her again, at an event, the warmth I’d become accustomed to wasn’t really there. She was still polite, but the interaction felt much more distant. I was already exhausted and anxious, and unfortunately I handled the moment less smoothly than I’d have liked.

I tried to apologize for missing an earlier opportunity to see her and asked whether she’d received my messages.

And she said a half formed “no”, and walked away .

That hit me much harder than it should have in the moment.

I ended up talking privately with someone I trusted at the event, and everything I’d been carrying for the past few months just came pouring out. There was this particular situation, but there was also a lot of accumulated grief and stress from other parts of my life.

I cried. A lot.

And eventually I learned something about her personal situation that I hadn’t known before, which completely changed how I understood the situation.

I’m not going to speculate about her motives. I’m not angry with her, and I’m not interested in making her the villain. She may have had completely legitimate reasons for handling things the way she did. Or not.

But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t hurt.

What bothers me most isn’t that she wasn’t available romantically. That’s her right, obviously.

It’s that I spent a long time trying to figure out what level of emotional investment made sense because the in-person connection felt so genuine while the communication outside of that environment was so inconsistent.

I wish I’d had more clarity.

Maybe she genuinely saw me as a friend and simply didn’t realize how much I had invested emotionally. Maybe she was uncomfortable having that conversation. Maybe I misread some things. Maybe there was something else going on that I know nothing about.

I genuinely don’t know.

And that’s exactly what makes this so difficult.

I think what I’m struggling with now is separating two things:

1. My feelings for her were real.

2. The situation may have been much more ambiguous than I understood at the time.

I’m not going to call it love. We didn’t know each other nearly well enough for me to make that claim.

But I genuinely liked her, and the connection mattered to me.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do with that.

Some fragrances remind me of her. Certain songs do too. Little things that used to be enjoyable suddenly have this emotional association attached to them.

it sucks because of how much we had in common. I met her through fragrance related things, so now I’m at a phase where it’s tough to enjoy this hobby without feeling a little sting.

I still feel like I fucked things up at that event too. Like I was demanding attention or something. And I feel like I did too much, made her unnecessarily uncomfortable and ruined her night. There were a lot of people in the industry at that place. Granted the only person I cried to was my friend, and when people walked by (outside) I immediately laughed it off and greeted them goodbye.

But I need help here brothers. How do I let this go? How can I enjoy my favorite things without feeling that sting?

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Need some more help brothers..