Hi all, feeling pretty stuck and confused in my current situation and am hoping for some guidance.
I'm a 21yo male from Indiana. Last August I got out of a 4 year relationship. The breakup had been a long time coming, and both of us had processed most of it before we made it official. This made it a lot less painful than it would have been otherwise. For the next three months I focused on getting back to feeling like my normal self. I was able to do this pretty fast because I had just moved here and got a new place with several close friends, and started getting close with a group of their female friends. With a new life and new friend group, I was able to get back to feeling very content being single.
There was one girl (F/21) within that new friend group who I had been interested in since meeting her. I found her extremely attractive and seemed to have good chemistry with her. I had decided I wouldn't make a move though, because I wanted to focus on myself and being single, and didn't want to make anything awkward within the friend group if she wasn't interested. However, around two months ago another girl in the friend group tipped me off that she was interested in me. As hesitant as I was to date again and make myself emotionally vulnerable again, I decided to go for it and ask her out.
We went out and it went great - we had great chemistry and a ton of fun, and kissed at the end of the night. On our second date we discussed what we were both looking for, and seemed to be on the same page with wanting to keep it casual and take it slow - my reason being that I was not far removed from a breakup and her reason being she was in her last year of college. We kept going out and it went so well. I've never had the early stages of dating come so easily and feel so natural with someone. Being in the same friend group helped. After a couple dates we started sleeping together. For about a month we went out once or twice a week, saw each other a couple more times a week hanging with the larger group, and slept over 3-4 times a week. We were having a ton of fun and everything seemed great.
Things started going south when I got tickets to an event in Miami with one of my friends. He told me his long-time girlfriend wanted to go too, but didn't want me to have to third wheel, so he asked if I could bring someone too. I asked the girl I had been seeing and she declined. Since I hadn't been in the early dating stages in over 4 years, I didn't realize that it could come off as moving very fast to invite someone on a trip like that. She started distancing herself a bit and one of our mutual friends told me that me inviting her had freaked her out. So I allowed her to distance herself to think things through, and after a couple weeks asked her to hang.
The first couple times I asked she always had some reason she couldn't. But a couple days later she came over. We watched netflix for a bit and before going to bed I brought up our situation and asked her if we could talk about where we both saw us going forward. I started by saying that I liked her a lot and was having a lot of fun with her, and wanted it to continue. I said that if it kept going well for awhile longer, I'd be open to putting a label on it. She said she liked me too and was having a lot of fun, but since it was her last year of college she did not want a relationship and didn't want to be on the path towards one. She apologized for if she had led me on while she figured out what she wanted, but we essentially ended things and she left.
For some reason it has been extremely hard for me to just move on from this. I think its because it seemed like such a promising possibility, so it hurts to think I won't get to see what could have been. It was like I only got a little taste of something so great before it was taken away. One of our mutual friends who I'm pretty close with told me I hadn't done anything wrong at all, and that she just wasn't in the headspace for something that felt like it was getting more serious. She also conjectured that she might still be having trouble letting go of her ex. Its frustrating because while we had both said we wanted to keep it casual and take it slow, she would regularly invite me over and go out with me and would text me first a lot of the time. Her behavior seemed to indicate she was really feeling it, until it did a near 180 almost overnight.
I'm not sure where to go from here. For the last week I started feeling pretty good again and got myself to start chatting with some tinder matches to remind myself there's more fish in the sea. But then yesterday she was over for dinner with our friend group and since then I've been back to feeling very down about it. Seeing her is just a reminder of what I want but can't have. I'm starting to feel like I have two options: try to reignite her interest and rekindle what we had, or distance myself from the friend group to get some space from her. That second option is not ideal at all, because I don't have many friends outside that group and that group includes my closest friends. But I'm not really sure if the first option would have any chance of working. I'm sure she still likes me, because she got jealous when she thought another girl in the group was hitting on me at a party the other week. But I'm not sure how to translate that into going out again.
Any advice on how to handle this is greatly appreciated!
TL;DR: Dated a girl in my friend group for a month and it went amazing until she felt it was getting too serious so we ended it and now I can't let her go; feels like I either have to get her back or distance myself from the friend group which would suck
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