Is it possible to be friends with a former crush?

Your situation sounds incredibly difficult and that anxiety is never fun. The nice thing about checking in with yourself and saying, “this is what I expect from myself” is it does weirdly help that anxiety.

Good luck and keep us posted!

 

yes I do believe it is

 

It might be possible, but tread carefully. It's easy to think you don't have feelings for someone and then find out that you still might. If you've sincerely moved on, then you won't really care what that person is doing, who they're dating, etc. If that's the case, then I don't think there's any harm in being friends. But I think it's hard to know.

 

Long time no talk, Dirty!

"However I feel her behaviour was and still is very attention seeking towards me and sometimes a little manipulative. I feel as though our ‘friendship’ crossed boundaries although nothing physical ever happened." - you

I would hold on to this quote of yours. That's a gut instinct, and even if it's untrue, this is how you feel about the situation and perceive your interactions with her. I'd say rightfully so after everything that's gone on. I try not to be wishy washy anymore, as we all know I gave my crush way too much string to tug me around on. So, I will be the one who says the unpopular no. I truly don't think you can ever be friends with this person, in the sense of being good friends.

I don't think work friendships are always the best thing most of the time anyway. After the intense analyzing and overthinking you've gone through during your time with her, it's really almost impossible to have a true friendship. You will always have some feeling for her, and getting closer will probably bring up those feelings again, and maybe make them intensify as time goes on, again. Then you will grow to resent her, which you already do, but even more so. She won't stop being flirty because it's her personality, and you will probably always read it as more than whatever it is to her.

There's a difference between being friendly, and being friends. I'd stick with the friendly and drop the friends option. Do yourself a favor and distance yourself so you stop looping back around.

And a friendly reminder that you've been going through this for at least two years now. That's a lot of time and energy to be spending on someone who, most likely, is not doing the same with you, but is living breezily and flirting it up with whomever she feels like in the moment.

 

Things like that do make it harder.... try not to get in your head about it tho. She came up to you, she put her arms around you. You were simply responding by instinct. I'm sitting in the waiting room of my therapist right now so I'm really in the mind set of looking at this as my therapist would. She would say, you can't control her actions you don't know what's really going on in her mind/ heart and that's ok. You control how you feel about it. Her giving you a hug that way does sound outside of regular friends to you and me, but we're not her. She might really just hug people like that.. she might have feelings for you..*even if she has those feelings she might not realize how much her feelings are affecting her actions* and who knows but her why she hugged you like that. So don't worry about why she did it, are you ok with it? If you knew she didn't mean anything by it would it be ok? And if it's not ok, you really just have to say something. No need getting into the big picture stuff just talk about the one thing that's bothering you. hey the other day when you hugged me from behind it was misleading for me. It would be helpful if you didn't do it that way... something like that anyway. You get the idea
Good luck