This is a long one ya'll.  
  
I (22F) have been working in a company for the past 7 months. I started in November 2025 as an HR intern and was recently offered a full-time role there. It’s an agency, free culture, a lot of young people working, and naturally, hormones going crazy all over.

My coworker in marketing, let’s call him Mark (25M), approached me for the first time back in February 2026, asking me for book recommendations since he already liked reading (mostly non-fiction) but was confused with where to start with fiction. As I told him about my favorite book series (which I recommend to literally everyone), he asked me whether we can go for a tea break together later once we’re done with our tasks, and that’s when I can explain a bit of the plot to him. Over the next few days, we began taking tea breaks together every day and got to know a few things about each other.

A day before Valentine’s, he asked me if I wanted to "hang out" with him so we could go café-hopping around the city. I tried not to think of it much, as I already knew he liked me (body language naturally tells a lot), and only went with him on the prospect that it was a hangout, as he proposed. We went to a cat café, then a museum, then a bookstore, and then got slushies together. He paid for the cat café and museum tickets, and I ended up paying for the slushies (since he insisted on not splitting the bill for the former two). He opened up to me about his ambitions and things that he’d been working on (something he’d apparently only told me), and I told him about my struggles with faith (we’re both Catholic, and this is something that I tend to discuss with a lot of people, not necessarily out of vulnerability). He picked me up and dropped me off. The next day, as we were texting, he told me it slipped his mind that it was Valentine’s the day before.

It didn’t take me much time to realize that even if I was open to exploring some romantic aspects with this guy before, we weren’t compatible, and some of his personality traits & future plans were not what I'd envision in my partner. Naturally, I made sure that I did not give him any further sign that I was romantically interested, but I was more than open to staying friends with him since I genuinely found his company enjoyable.

Over the next few weeks, we’d text almost every day; his overthinking would spike when I’d take a while to reply because he’d think that he texted something wrong. I had already told him multiple times that I was trying to reduce my screentime, so it might happen often. There were also times that he’d delete the texts before I even read them. When all of this was going on, I was pretty set on the idea that I only wanted to be friends with this guy.

In the initial days when we texted, he would do things like ask me what my type in men is (he did not fit my type). He also told me what his type in women was (I was an even worse fit for him, but he did not see that). He would also insist on a lot of things. Asked me once for my jhumka (earring) so he could make a keychain out of it for his bike—this was something that had been a couples' trend online. I declined and said it was too soon for that. He’d also call me a nickname that I didn’t catch the first few times, but then I told him not to use it because we weren’t that close. He listened to me but only after a lot of insistence, and I had to be very stern for him to understand I wasn’t joking. This caught me off guard since I’d already mentioned that I would tell him if anything made me uncomfortable, and even after acknowledging that, he continued pushing me for a few things until I’d have to be stern or even rude with him.

We decided after a week or two that we wouldn’t have one-on-one hangouts in the office space since a lot of other coworkers had started talking about us; we would hang out with groups. But when I went to hang out with other coworkers without involving him, he would immediately point that out (which ticked me off since I could not invite him to hangouts that others had planned). After that one hangout on Valentine’s and a church mass we attended on Ash Wednesday, I made sure I avoided going on one-on-one hangouts with him. He’d also complained about how I didn’t have enough time to go out with him on weekends (when I already had fixed plans with my family), and I had to rudely snap back that I couldn’t change plans I’d already made with my literal family just to accommodate his feelings.

And I made sure to express multiple times that I wasn’t interested. Not texting much, avoiding one-on-one hangouts outside, making sure that there is no flirtatious talk going on at all (we never did any of that talk in the first place!), and even making sure that if he were to be vulnerable with me, I would answer in the most diplomatic + psychology-oriented way possible (I am a psychology major after all). I even mentioned multiple times my general preference of not dating coworkers, a rule I’ll be sticking to throughout my professional life hopefully.

But OP, why not just reject him directly? Guess what, I did.

In the second-to-last weekend of March, we went on a group hangout with a few other coworkers. He picked me up and dropped me off (I told him it was not necessary, but he insisted anyway). While dropping me off, I thought of telling him this hilarious story of how I found out a Hinge guy that I talked to a few months ago turned out to be cousins with the director of my college dormitory, the man who I had serious beef with. And instead of the normal “how did you find that out?" and “how small is the world?" he kept asking me about the Hinge guy. "Do you still talk to him? When did you first start talking? Have you met yet? When you go back to college for my exam, are you planning to meet him? Did you like him?" I told him I didn’t like the Hinge guy and that I wasn’t really open to dating at the moment. He asked me why, and I told him I was pretty happy with my social & personal life.

That’s when he decided to confess. More like “confess” since he never told me directly that he liked me. He implied that I knew why he asked me about my dating preferences, and I said yes, I did. He asked me what my answer was, and I said no. I repeat, I said: "No, that I wasn’t interested". He asked me why again. I told him I wasn’t open to dating anyone at the moment and that I just saw him as a good friend. He nodded in what I thought was acceptance. Then he asked if this would change things for me, and I said I would probably maintain a bit of distance from him. I repeat: I told him, "I’d start maintaining distance". When I asked him the same question, he said things wouldn’t change for him; they’d stay the same. I thought he meant that he’d continue to be friends with me and interact. Apparently, I was wrong; what he meant was he will not give up on the idea of pursuing me romantically.

(continuing this in a comment thread)

I rejected my coworker; he did not take it too well