I had a crush on a co-worker from the day I walked into the office, but she was married. 12 years later she was single and I found myself in her bedroom. Our relationship ended up being a big mess, but for that one night, it was worth the wait.
I met him when I was 18 and the attraction was intense and scary for me. He was 8 years older and I avoided being alone with him. He got a job up north and I married. I divorced. I went back to school. So did he. We flirted for a year or so and he asked me out. We dated for 4 months before we got to it. It was intense.
It didn’t last. But it was intense. Almost 20 years after we met.
Life is so crazy, isn’t it?
I was like all “No one can match 39 years,” Olives, when I realized I had done my math wrong, and it was even crazier than I thought. I’d been thinking of this as a special category of sexual accomplishment, and one I take a peculiar interest in, or maybe it’s not so peculiar. I’ve done this several times, never with a almost a half-century between crushing on someone and hooking up, but I was with someone from 2001-2005 whom I first found cute in kindergarten, which was 1958, so that’s over 40 years as well, and I met my ex-wife in the summer of '69 and we weren’t a couple until 1977 or '78. I’ve also gotten together with some women I knew in high school in the past ten years, so that’s uh, say, 1970 for first sighting and mid-1990s for first screwing, which is pretty good, twenty-five odd years.
It gives me an inordinate amount of pleasure to revive old crushes. I wonder if there’s a name for this peculiarity. (I know, I know, “necrophilia.”)
Mrs. Homie. Met her in August 1992, got with her on our wedding night April 1997.
How about this one. Met a girl when i was 14, love at first sight. She thought i was nice, we hung out, became good friends. Over the years we stayed close, talked often, saw each other a couple of times a year. Lots of relationships for both of us over the years, but i was in the "friend zone "and that was that. **24 **years later she came to her senses. Dated for 3 years but didn’t work out in the end.
I met a girl the day we moved to Winnipeg, 1.5 months before my 8th birthday (and 1 month before hers), she was in my new grade 2 class and, according to my mom, she was all I could talk about when I came home that day.
We were best friends for the next 17 years or so, I have no idea when it progressed from being best friends to being romantic (especially since we were never “physical” at any point in our lives, I don’t know if that’s a requirement in the OP) - probably when puberty, hormones, and never finding a date with anyone else, being social outcasts in jr. high and high school combined - but we were always each others’ “default date” (she was my date to jr. high grad and high school grad, handy having a best friend of the opposite sex for that!) When I reached my 20s I did date a few girls unsuccessfully, can’t recall what my best friend’s reaction was to this, but after a couple of them, I decided to look at her again, and remembered how long she’s been with me and how much she meant to me, I finally decided to ask her to marry me one day. She was surprised, yet accepted, and we set a date for roughly 5 years hense (had no idea why we set it for so long in the future, we weren’t living together or anything). I realized a year or so later that while she had always been a stellar friend, she might be a much better friend than a wife. I asked her to give me a call so we can talk about it. 15 years later and that call still has yet to come.
I realized later that it’s very hard to going back to “just friends” after taking things a step further, and am utterly amazed at those (and there are several in this thread alone) that can, even with the added complications of sex before a return to friendship. I do miss her as a friend, but I also realize that had I stayed with her, and seen the marriage through, I wouldn’t be as happy as I am with Mrs. dhkendall.
My answer to the OP is in there somewhere I guess, but I felt that this tale of heartbreak and woe had to be released into the SDMB somewhere, as it’s a part of what made me the person I am today.
When I started my first call centre job, I had one of those never-going-to-do-something-about-it crushes on a coworker, but it was clear it was never going to move past mild flirtation… I had a serious BF, for one, and he had a serious GF of his own. So we just stuck with the usual coworker conversation topics and mild flirtatious banter.
About three years later, we got to talking at an after-work company event and discovered that both of us were recently single. We hooked up within 48 hours of that discussion, and chuckled over the fact that neither of had known that the other had a crush for the whole time we’d known each other.
Neither of us really wanted to get seriously involved with anyone at that point, let alone a coworker… but we did have quite a bit of fun over the next couple of weeks before calling it quits.
Other than that, I’ve never gone more than a couple of months between hello and sexy-time.
At the company where I began to work in 1996, I met a nice guy. He asked me out a couple of times, but I really don’t like to date co-workers in a small workplace.
Fast forward almost four years.
Our plant was closing. I was dating someone else. Mike gave me his phone number and asked if I would be interested in keeping in touch. I said yes, but as a friend (remember, I was seeing someone else).
The relationship I was in didn’t pan out and Mike and I remained friends for a few more months before he asked me out for a date. Why not?
We dated for seven years before his passing in 2007. He was definitely worth the wait.
My wife and I dated, briefly in college. After we broke up we remained friends, with both dating several people in between. We start dating again 10 years later, got married the next year, and have been married almost ten years.
23 seconds. I have this phenomenal, yet inexplicable power over women.
Seven years and a couple of months. I met him the same day I met my now-ex-husband. He was the best friend of said ex at the time. Seven years later, I was divorced, he’d just broken up with his long-term girlfriend. I’d always kind of liked him. . .
. . .it was an insanely bad idea. I’ll leave it at that. The actual getting was good. I probably needed it. But the rest was bad mojo, and not worth it.