I am going through a bit of a crisis and I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. I originally met a girl in the summer of 2021 who was visiting my city for two months. The first date was inexplicably good, and the next two built on top of it. We had such an extraordinary connection, not just in the content of what we talked about, but the ease we had in sharing with each other. We talked about worldly things with great passion and very personal things with great tenderness. We both seemed to have a bottomless desire simply to know the other person as well and truly as possible. I had been in love before and I was familiar with the feelings of infatuation and euphoria that come with it, but this time there seemed to be, objectively, such strong substance supporting the feelings that it would be simply bullheaded to not let myself enjoy the experience of finding someone that I was waiting for my whole life.
The first time I had feelings that I called “love” for a girl, I was five. I was in kindergarten. At the end of the school day, having put our backpacks on, we waited for the final bell to sound. I imagined going up to her and professing that I loved her, knowing that I would then have to kill myself to avoid the deluge of vulnerability and shame that would overwhelm me after doing so. For the next two decades of my life, I would daydream about meeting someone who I not only felt such strong feelings for, but who I would feel safe enough with conveying them to and even owning them to myself. For every girl in school who I had a crush on, despite there being a good chance that they reciprocated my feelings, I was too uncomfortable admitting my feelings to myself to act. It just felt impossibly sensitive to admit to feeling this way about someone, even to a friend or family member.
In 2018, for the first time, I had had enough. I developed an infatuation with a coworker. We became incredibly intimate friends, but she was much older, and considered our age difference a nonstarter. I was twenty-three, and she was looking for a husband. I hadn’t even had my wild twenties yet, or knew who I was, she said. I was hurt, and I thought she was wrong, that we were right for each other and that our feelings could overcome these circumstances. But, after a few months of her not budging, I accepted reality and moved on. I had to reluctantly end our friendship so that I could move on romantically. At this point, this was the deepest love I had ever felt. This relationship had a level of intimacy that I had never experienced before in my life. I opened up with her about things I’ve never opened up with anyone before or since. Still, I was able to march forward. She had chosen to not pursue me and that, to me, was proof enough that we truly weren’t meant to be together. The person for me would recognize that I was the person for them. I felt this deeply and sincerely, which allowed me to move on decisively.
Over the next three years’ time, I thought long and hard about this experience and my previous experiences of what I called love. Although I had always felt that I was never wrongly turning love into a panacea, waiting around for a girl to “fix everything”, like a common stereotype of some young people, I decided that I had leaned more into that direction than I should have. I generally moved away from thinking that love could be felt or intuited and that it had to be approached much more pragmatically. I moved away from thinking that there was a “the one” or that love would have a radical effect on my life. I decided that it would be an incremental improvement, like a really good friend, that it was someone who I was attracted to and could spend time with without much trouble. I stopped looking for love as something that would bring out sides of me that normally lie dormant, or something that would make the world a bit brighter and more expansive. I made up my mind that these sorts of things were things that I had to solely influence myself. My expectations for love should shrink.
For the first time in my life, I lived as if there was no great romantic revelation waiting for me. I got a girlfriend, which was a first. It wasn’t great fun, but she was beautiful and we were “working on things”. That was how it worked, after all. People aren’t perfect and you can’t expect the world, I told myself. After a few months, it ended. I was devastated, but relieved. I did not love her and I was not in love with her. During our time together, I had constantly debated with myself if she was right for me. I was putting my new approach into practice, but it wasn’t feeling right.
The next year and a few months go by, with nothing changing in my beliefs about romance. They remained pragmatic and deflated. Then, the summer of 2021 happened. Upon seeing her in person, I’m immediately struck by something. Not love, not at all yet, just that she is beautiful and has an intriguing energy. About fifteen minutes in, and I realize that she is funny. I can’t stop giggling and neither can she. A little after that, I realize she is smart. We have incredible overlapping interests and compatibilities. We both feel at home with every topic that we bring up. Over the course of the date, she checks every box, resurrected boxes that I had given up on and checks them as well. I leave the date floating a tad.
For the first time in my life ever, after my first date, I called a friend. As I was still intensely shy about sharing my romantic feelings with other people, I didn’t intend to explicitly talk about my date. However, after a few minutes of smalltalk, he called me out – “so what’s up? First of all, you never call and second of all, you sound different.” “I just went out with a girl”. I had no shame of my feelings. I was confident that they were real, genuine, that I would feel safe from whatever dangers I had previously associated with acknowledging romantic feelings. It wasn’t just my connection with the girl that felt right, I was embracing that it felt right in a way that I had previously never embraced. Even with my old coworker who I fell for, I had kept my feelings for her private from everyone. I pursued her and dealt with my feelings for her totally privately. Owning up to the fact that I had a really sparkly, bubbly first date with someone was something new. Feeling confident in it only gave me more confidence in their nature and authenticity.
Our second date would have to wait. She was visiting her grandfather, who she barely knew, for two weeks because he lived in a nearby state. When she got back, we didn’t skip a beat. Our second date was spectacular, dizzying fun even though we just went out and had dinner and talked together. For our third date, I had plans. We were going to walk here and there, get food here, go there. As soon as we got to our first stop, which was a local beach, we decided to watch the sunset, only for a few moments. That turned into talking for five hours straight. We were simply too rooted to our conversation and each other to move. Then, around midnight, with the rest of the beach empty for the past few hours, we had our first kiss. I drove her home and then drove back to my house in solemn joy.
My experience with this girl, Natalie, was delivering me from a lifetime of unmet longings for romance. It made me feel like, sparing any sense of exaggeration, that my life had been spent on a deserted island and that I had now seen a ship dock on the beach. The sensation was thrilling particularly because of how high the stakes became. It wasn’t the amazing time spent with Natalie. It was the new way that it felt to be me as I went through my daily activities. I felt like all the sharp edges inside of me had been made to lie flush. I was feeling more equanimous and placid, than the high and exuberant feelings you might be imagining from someone talking about falling in love. The pieces of my life had finally fallen into places and made sense. I walked around knowing that I could, for the rest of my life, look back on my journey until this point and experience an appreciation and awe whenever I wanted. I felt proud of myself and positive. I felt that what I experienced, from the mundane to the painful, had been made meaningful. All of these feelings came with the realization that, despite my best efforts, I did not feel this way before Natalie. That, though I tried to do my best, I was not happy. That I did not feel like my life was meaningful. That I didn’t look at what I had done or experienced and ascribed much worth to it at all. Now, from the safety of having what I had always wanted, I could see how badly I was lying to myself that I didn’t want it or need it. I could see how poor of a shape I had been in, and how I could never be able to go back. This relationship gave my past suffering and loneliness some meaning. It was the happy ending to the life that I mostly considered a great struggle and looked at with sadness. It was getting to live out the only wish that I’ve ever had for my life on earth, experiencing being loved by a woman.
I felt all of this, but I tried to tone it down. It had only been three dates. My friend from the phone call texted me, checking in about “that girl”. I told him “that girl is probably going to be my wife one day”. I was being tongue-in-cheek, mocking the intensity of my feelings given how early it was, but I was also acknowledging, without any shame or undue sense of vulnerability, that they existed. For the first time ever, I was falling in love in a way that I thought made sense and wasn’t embarrassed of, where I could see a future. Then, we go out for a fourth time. It’s a Friday. We meet for dinner. After twenty or thirty minutes of genuinely belly aching laughter, she calms down and gives me the news. She isn’t staying in town for as long as she thought, she’s actually leaving earlier. When are you leaving, I ask. On Wednesday, she says. I can still feel the reflex from my stomach and shoulder when I heard that. I didn’t understand. I knew she was leaving eventually, but at this point it seemed like before she left we’d be able to build up to something we could take long distance, then plan to join our lives together. She had other ideas. She didn’t even have to go back. She just said she’s been gone a while and she should get back to work and she misses her friends and family. I couldn’t understand it. I thought I had met the perfect person and that she felt the same way.
Over the next few days, I was inconsolable. When we hung out on Saturday, I tried to be alright, but I couldn’t. I broke down. I communicated my heartbreak. She was supportive and nurturing and assured me she was very sad as well. I told her I don’t understand how she can do this and that it seems like she doesn’t really care about me. This hurt her, and I showed great remorse, although I did not fully understand why she was so hurt by it. We hung out again on Sunday. We said goodbye on Tuesday evening, on the beach. I had got her a present from one of our previous dates. The day before, I returned to where we sat talking on the beach and had our first kiss. I filled two small bottles with sand from the exact spot. I gave her one as a parting gift. I made her a card featuring photos of her from our time together and wrote her something very touching and poetic. I had always wanted to be able to express deep and powerful affection and now I had the opportunity to do so. I made sure to avoid it being pleading or sad, to not spoil it. I hope that it meant something to her.
In the Fall of 2022, I moved to the city where she lived. It wasn’t to chase her - I didn’t know if she still lived there – but if she was an option, all the better. I messaged her. We met and talked in the park and ended up getting dinner. We made plans to see each other again, but she had a work trip get extended and then she ghosted our text conversation. I didn’t want to seem pestering, and felt very self-conscious about the fact that I moved to her city, so I left it, decided that she didn’t want to date me but wanted to avoid the discomfort of telling me so. A few weeks went by, and I couldn’t leave it alone anymore. I couldn’t go the rest of my life without understanding if maybe there was a miscommunication, or if she was waiting for me to pursue her more, so I messaged her, asking to see her again. She let me know that she recently began seeing someone exclusively, so it’d have to be platonic. At that time, I felt like I needed the space to move on, so I told her I needed some time and space if we were going to be platonic friends.
Yesterday, I messaged her and asked how she was. She said good and how was I. I said good and said I’d love to see her. She told me she’s engaged and busy with wedding planning, but that she would like to see me too if I’m okay with it being platonic. I assume her fiance is the same person she began seeing exclusively a little more than two years ago. We saw each other a half dozen times three and a half years ago, one time almost two and a half years ago, and yet here I am. I don’t really even know this person. That is one of the painful things about it. It seemed like getting to know this person was going to be one of my favorite things I had ever done in my life, and then that didn’t happen. I never got to know her, much less have a relationship together.
I don’t think I had ever felt so sure of anything in my entire life as I was that this was going to turn into a relationship and that this relationship was going to work out. I certainly have never wanted anything so much.
The only thing that makes me feel better is writing about it.
p
I am going through a bit of a crisis and I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. I originally met a girl in the summer of 2021 who was visiting my city for two months. The first date was inexplicably good, and the next two built on top of it. We had such an extraordinary connection, not just in the content of what we talked about, but the ease we had in sharing with each other. We talked about worldly things with great passion and very personal things with great tenderness. We both seemed to have a bottomless desire simply to know the other person as well and truly as possible. I had been in love before and I was familiar with the feelings of infatuation and euphoria that come with it, but this time there seemed to be, objectively, such strong substance supporting the feelings that it would be simply bullheaded to not let myself enjoy the experience of finding someone that I was waiting for my whole life.
The first time I had feelings that I called “love” for a girl, I was five. I was in kindergarten. At the end of the school day, having put our backpacks on, we waited for the final bell to sound. I imagined going up to her and professing that I loved her, knowing that I would then have to kill myself to avoid the deluge of vulnerability and shame that would overwhelm me after doing so. For the next two decades of my life, I would daydream about meeting someone who I not only felt such strong feelings for, but who I would feel safe enough with conveying them to and even owning them to myself. For every girl in school who I had a crush on, despite there being a good chance that they reciprocated my feelings, I was too uncomfortable admitting my feelings to myself to act. It just felt impossibly sensitive to admit to feeling this way about someone, even to a friend or family member.
In 2018, for the first time, I had had enough. I developed an infatuation with a coworker. We became incredibly intimate friends, but she was much older, and considered our age difference a nonstarter. I was twenty-three, and she was looking for a husband. I hadn’t even had my wild twenties yet, or knew who I was, she said. I was hurt, and I thought she was wrong, that we were right for each other and that our feelings could overcome these circumstances. But, after a few months of her not budging, I accepted reality and moved on. I had to reluctantly end our friendship so that I could move on romantically. At this point, this was the deepest love I had ever felt. This relationship had a level of intimacy that I had never experienced before in my life. I opened up with her about things I’ve never opened up with anyone before or since. Still, I was able to march forward. She had chosen to not pursue me and that, to me, was proof enough that we truly weren’t meant to be together. The person for me would recognize that I was the person for them. I felt this deeply and sincerely, which allowed me to move on decisively.
Over the next three years’ time, I thought long and hard about this experience and my previous experiences of what I called love. Although I had always felt that I was never wrongly turning love into a panacea, waiting around for a girl to “fix everything”, like a common stereotype of some young people, I decided that I had leaned more into that direction than I should have. I generally moved away from thinking that love could be felt or intuited and that it had to be approached much more pragmatically. I moved away from thinking that there was a “the one” or that love would have a radical effect on my life. I decided that it would be an incremental improvement, like a really good friend, that it was someone who I was attracted to and could spend time with without much trouble. I stopped looking for love as something that would bring out sides of me that normally lie dormant, or something that would make the world a bit brighter and more expansive. I made up my mind that these sorts of things were things that I had to solely influence myself. My expectations for love should shrink.
For the first time in my life, I lived as if there was no great romantic revelation waiting for me. I got a girlfriend, which was a first. It wasn’t great fun, but she was beautiful and we were “working on things”. That was how it worked, after all. People aren’t perfect and you can’t expect the world, I told myself. After a few months, it ended. I was devastated, but relieved. I did not love her and I was not in love with her. During our time together, I had constantly debated with myself if she was right for me. I was putting my new approach into practice, but it wasn’t feeling right.
The next year and a few months go by, with nothing changing in my beliefs about romance. They remained pragmatic and deflated. Then, the summer of 2021 happened. Upon seeing her in person, I’m immediately struck by something. Not love, not at all yet, just that she is beautiful and has an intriguing energy. About fifteen minutes in, and I realize that she is funny. I can’t stop giggling and neither can she. A little after that, I realize she is smart. We have incredible overlapping interests and compatibilities. We both feel at home with every topic that we bring up. Over the course of the date, she checks every box, resurrected boxes that I had given up on and checks them as well. I leave the date floating a tad.
For the first time in my life ever, after my first date, I called a friend. As I was still intensely shy about sharing my romantic feelings with other people, I didn’t intend to explicitly talk about my date. However, after a few minutes of smalltalk, he called me out – “so what’s up? First of all, you never call and second of all, you sound different.” “I just went out with a girl”. I had no shame of my feelings. I was confident that they were real, genuine, that I would feel safe from whatever dangers I had previously associated with acknowledging romantic feelings. It wasn’t just my connection with the girl that felt right, I was embracing that it felt right in a way that I had previously never embraced. Even with my old coworker who I fell for, I had kept my feelings for her private from everyone. I pursued her and dealt with my feelings for her totally privately. Owning up to the fact that I had a really sparkly, bubbly first date with someone was something new. Feeling confident in it only gave me more confidence in their nature and authenticity.
Our second date would have to wait. She was visiting her grandfather, who she barely knew, for two weeks because he lived in a nearby state. When she got back, we didn’t skip a beat. Our second date was spectacular, dizzying fun even though we just went out and had dinner and talked together. For our third date, I had plans. We were going to walk here and there, get food here, go there. As soon as we got to our first stop, which was a local beach, we decided to watch the sunset, only for a few moments. That turned into talking for five hours straight. We were simply too rooted to our conversation and each other to move. Then, around midnight, with the rest of the beach empty for the past few hours, we had our first kiss. I drove her home and then drove back to my house in solemn joy.
My experience with this girl, Natalie, was delivering me from a lifetime of unmet longings for romance. It made me feel like, sparing any sense of exaggeration, that my life had been spent on a deserted island and that I had now seen a ship dock on the beach. The sensation was thrilling particularly because of how high the stakes became. It wasn’t the amazing time spent with Natalie. It was the new way that it felt to be me as I went through my daily activities. I felt like all the sharp edges inside of me had been made to lie flush. I was feeling more equanimous and placid, than the high and exuberant feelings you might be imagining from someone talking about falling in love. The pieces of my life had finally fallen into places and made sense. I walked around knowing that I could, for the rest of my life, look back on my journey until this point and experience an appreciation and awe whenever I wanted. I felt proud of myself and positive. I felt that what I experienced, from the mundane to the painful, had been made meaningful. All of these feelings came with the realization that, despite my best efforts, I did not feel this way before Natalie. That, though I tried to do my best, I was not happy. That I did not feel like my life was meaningful. That I didn’t look at what I had done or experienced and ascribed much worth to it at all. Now, from the safety of having what I had always wanted, I could see how badly I was lying to myself that I didn’t want it or need it. I could see how poor of a shape I had been in, and how I could never be able to go back. This relationship gave my past suffering and loneliness some meaning. It was the happy ending to the life that I mostly considered a great struggle and looked at with sadness. It was getting to live out the only wish that I’ve ever had for my life on earth, experiencing being loved by a woman.
I felt all of this, but I tried to tone it down. It had only been three dates. My friend from the phone call texted me, checking in about “that girl”. I told him “that girl is probably going to be my wife one day”. I was being tongue-in-cheek, mocking the intensity of my feelings given how early it was, but I was also acknowledging, without any shame or undue sense of vulnerability, that they existed. For the first time ever, I was falling in love in a way that I thought made sense and wasn’t embarrassed of, where I could see a future. Then, we go out for a fourth time. It’s a Friday. We meet for dinner. After twenty or thirty minutes of genuinely belly aching laughter, she calms down and gives me the news. She isn’t staying in town for as long as she thought, she’s actually leaving earlier. When are you leaving, I ask. On Wednesday, she says. I can still feel the reflex from my stomach and shoulder when I heard that. I didn’t understand. I knew she was leaving eventually, but at this point it seemed like before she left we’d be able to build up to something we could take long distance, then plan to join our lives together. She had other ideas. She didn’t even have to go back. She just said she’s been gone a while and she should get back to work and she misses her friends and family. I couldn’t understand it. I thought I had met the perfect person and that she felt the same way.
Over the next few days, I was inconsolable. When we hung out on Saturday, I tried to be alright, but I couldn’t. I broke down. I communicated my heartbreak. She was supportive and nurturing and assured me she was very sad as well. I told her I don’t understand how she can do this and that it seems like she doesn’t really care about me. This hurt her, and I showed great remorse, although I did not fully understand why she was so hurt by it. We hung out again on Sunday. We said goodbye on Tuesday evening, on the beach. I had got her a present from one of our previous dates. The day before, I returned to where we sat talking on the beach and had our first kiss. I filled two small bottles with sand from the exact spot. I gave her one as a parting gift. I made her a card featuring photos of her from our time together and wrote her something very touching and poetic. I had always wanted to be able to express deep and powerful affection and now I had the opportunity to do so. I made sure to avoid it being pleading or sad, to not spoil it. I hope that it meant something to her.
In the Fall of 2022, I moved to the city where she lived. It wasn’t to chase her - I didn’t know if she still lived there – but if she was an option, all the better. I messaged her. We met and talked in the park and ended up getting dinner. We made plans to see each other again, but she had a work trip get extended and then she ghosted our text conversation. I didn’t want to seem pestering, and felt very self-conscious about the fact that I moved to her city, so I left it, decided that she didn’t want to date me but wanted to avoid the discomfort of telling me so. A few weeks went by, and I couldn’t leave it alone anymore. I couldn’t go the rest of my life without understanding if maybe there was a miscommunication, or if she was waiting for me to pursue her more, so I messaged her, asking to see her again. She let me know that she recently began seeing someone exclusively, so it’d have to be platonic. At that time, I felt like I needed the space to move on, so I told her I needed some time and space if we were going to be platonic friends.
Yesterday, I messaged her and asked how she was. She said good and how was I. I said good and said I’d love to see her. She told me she’s engaged and busy with wedding planning, but that she would like to see me too if I’m okay with it being platonic. I assume her fiance is the same person she began seeing exclusively a little more than two years ago. We saw each other a half dozen times three and a half years ago, one time almost two and a half years ago, and yet here I am. I don’t really even know this person. That is one of the painful things about it. It seemed like getting to know this person was going to be one of my favorite things I had ever done in my life, and then that didn’t happen. I never got to know her, much less have a relationship together.
I don’t think I had ever felt so sure of anything in my entire life as I was that this was going to turn into a relationship and that this relationship was going to work out. I certainly have never wanted anything so much.
The only thing that makes me feel better is writing about it.
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