Does he have feelings for me and didn't realise it until he lost me?

I started to hang out a lot as friends with a guy from work (I was crazy about him) and we became best friends over a period of time. One night we were drunk and ended up in bed. He seemed really cold after for a while and said it was a bad idea.

The same thing happened a few weeks later and from there we started hanging out a lot more often and having sex most weekends, so I thought we were becoming a couple as it seemed like the relationship we were having made us both happy and he always wanted to spend time with me.

After a couple of months of that, I told him I was in love with him and asked him where things were going. I was getting upset because he had never taken me on a date or anything so it felt a bit like only part of a relationship and I wanted the full thing.

He said his situation was difficult because he had a girl he was in a relationship with long distance and he said as I had developed feelings, we should stop seeing each other because he was committed to the other girl and wanted to have a future with her.

I was confused though because he sent mixed messages by continuing to want to hang out with me and then after a few weeks drunk sex started up again and we came to a point of sleeping in the same bed nearly every night with me constantly asking him to leave his girlfriend for me and him refusing.

This went on a little while until his girlfriend got suspicious and he confessed to her and there was a big drama. He told me he loved her and couldn’t see or speak to me ever again and flew thousands of miles to beg her to take him back.

I was really devastated, because we had spent nearly every day together for months and I was sure I made him happy so I could not understand why he was choosing someone else when it was me he was sharing every day with. I couldn’t understand how overnight I meant nothing to him but he sent me a note apologising for leading me on and hurting me but saying it was over, and after that he refused all my attempts to contact him

When he finally came back after a couple of months, I thought I’d be able to talk to him at work, but he avoided me completely and if I tried to speak to him he told me he could not talk to me. I begged him to meet me for closure and he refused to do that, saying he had promised his girlfriend he would not see me anymore.

After a few months, I ran into him in a bar and he was really, really drunk. He told me he had split up with his girlfriend after some big fight and really missed me, and we slept together. The next day, he completely blanked me again and told me it was a drunk mistake because he was upset about his girlfriend dumping him but he was going to try and win her back and needed not to see me.

I was really upset and asked him to meet me to explain and he did that. He told me that we had fun together, but we didn’t want the same things and he loved someone else, and even if he was split up with her nothing could happen with us because we didn’t want the same things.

At this point I finally realised he obviously had no feelings for me so I tried to move on with my life and met someone else. Once I did that, he got jealous and started trying to contact me sometimes. I ran into him drunk again and he said he found it really hard to let me go which was really confusing.

He is on-again / off-again with his girlfriend and he says he loves her but he seems conflicted between the two of us now. We talked and he says he thinks maybe what he has done has ruined their relationship and maybe he could have been happy with me. He says he misses me a lot and has found it hard to live without me.

Does this mean he has grown feelings for me and didn’t realise? Or do you think he means he just misses me as a friend?