Context: We are both in our early 20s, I am older than her by about 3 years.
So, I worked with this girl for a couple months and during our time working together we started getting close and I started picking up a few signs from her. Signs of: laughing at my bad jokes, stealing glances when she thought I wasn't looking, nervousness/trying to impress, strong eye contact, classic stuff. Sometimes it was subtle, other times it was full on sparkly/doughy eyes and playing with her hair, when we spoke.
Eventually I asked her out for coffee after work. She was visibly taken aback and sort of giggly said sure! We talked for a few hours, before she headed home, saying "hopefully I'll see you tomorrow". The next week I asked if she wanted to go bowling and she said yeah. We planned the evening and the date went great. We laughed a lot and had some deep conversation. Again we sat and spoke for hours, and multiple times she was like "oh I should go", but then we would talk for another 20 minutes. (She lead, I wasn't trying to keep her there)
The next day I messaged her thanking her for the evening and trying to set something else up. Well turns out not only is she in a committed relationship already, she is also a gay (has a girlfriend). Naturally I was surprised, disappointed, and backed of. She said she hoped we could still be friends, and I agreed. Things seemed OK.
I'm just confused by the whole thing. I mean she would talk about being interested in guys to me, (before dating) and I tried to make it very clear these were dates. The kicker though is that after all this came out, the signs of interest slowed down, but they didn't stop. I would still see her catching glances at me, etc.
She changed jobs recently, and as everyone was saying their goodbyes, she didn't say goodbye to me. However, as she left she did do a glance back at me.
Can anyone rationalize this? I know this won't really give me closure, but I would value some outside perspective.
