Dear Belle:

You shared that you are 29, “crazily crushing over a guy” who you knew since he was in your 1st grade class. The two of you hung out several times in your early 20s, but he was “hot and cold… going silent on me”, you wrote, and the last time you hung out was in 2013.

Fast forward, in August 2020 you contacted him after finding out that he got out of a 3-year relationship. Christmas 2020, he texted you Merry Christmas, and on January 4, 2021, you saw him in person for the first time in seven years. He treated you to a restaurant out of town, was very attentive, gentlemanly,  made you feel at ease, “so seen and heard”, and it was “the most fun I have had with a man in my entire life.. too perfect to be true”. After dinner, you went to his place, “slightly cuddling on his couch. Nothing funny, no touching really”. At the end of the night, after you got out of his truck, the two of you kissed each other, “not too crazy but not a peck on the lips either”. He then drove away and texted you around 2 am to tell you that he was home.

Two days after that date, Jan 6, you contacted him and told him that you would “really like him in my life more”, he agreed, you asked him about his intentions in regard to you, and he told you that “he was sorry he got carried away with the kiss… that he was really just hoping to get to know me better, to reconnect and hang out more”. You then asked him if he was “looking to hang out to work towards a relationship or if he just wanted to be a bro’s”, and he said that he likes you but “was emotionally drained and not in the headspace to take on a relationship right now”, and paraphrased by you, he told you that  “a girl he cut ties with was obsessing over him, and he didn’t want me to be a part of the drama”.

A few days later, he suggested that the two of you will go hiking, or “go walking with him”. Next, he texted you four days in a row, “as if we were dating”. Thursday evening, a week and a day ago, he told you that you “had ocean eyes”, that the song made him think of you. You told him that there were several songs that made you think of him. And then he said: “wouldn’t it be crazy if you and me ended up getting married?”. You told him: “I had a big fat crush on you my entire life!!”, and he said: “I’m getting emotional. You’re the first girl I ever liked in my life!”

Sunday, five days ago,  you went hiking, he put his arm around you, “flirted like crazy and seemed genuinely stoked to be with me.. stare(d) at me with fondness”. He then bought you dinner and back to his place with a movie to watch. After the movie the two of you “started making out, and it got intense. Too intense.. It escalated.. I could tell he was really wanting to go all the way”. You stopped him because you remembered that he told you that he was not ready for a relationship and because you are “extremely insecure” about your body, he stopped, then you made out again, and eventually, you told him that you “just couldn’t go all the way without a relationship”, and he said that he understood. You drove home.

The next day, Monday of this week,  you woke up to a text from him, apologizing for getting carried away the previous night. You let him know that it takes two, and that you know “he’s not ready for anything serious right now, so we should take it easy”, and that you “just could not personally do a friends with benefits situation”. Tuesday he did not respond to a meme you sent him. Wednesday he texted you at 8pm, sounding “very bland and impersonal”. You asked him if he wanted to hang out again sometime and he said: “I just feel bad for taking things too far..  got carried away.. doesn’t want to lead anyone on when he’s not trying to start a serious relationship”, “I really really need some peace… It seems being alone is the only way to have it”.

You told him that the two of you can “hang out and chill from here on and it could just be that simple, no pressure”, and he said “it doesn’t seem that simple though because of the way I talk about stuff.. the way our conversations escalate and get so serious… we’ve only hung out twice, it shouldn’t be this tense lol”

The day after is today, Friday, Jan  22, and you are afraid that he will not contact you, that you “have proven his point right about relationships/ people being drama”, and you are confused or upset about him sending you mixed signals: that he is interested and attracted to you, “and then he goes cold on me when we depart”.

You are wondering why years before, in your early 20s, before any kind of sex entered the picture, he went hot and cold on you;  why he went cold on you this time; wondering if he “is actually simply a player who was hoping for a friend with benefits situation”, and whether he “actually is genuinely interested in me, but got carried away again” and realized that he can’t control himself, and therefore, he figured that he needs to back away. You are wondering whether you should “just drop it and not reach back out to him”, or that you reach out to him and say that it was “a complete miscommunication”, etc.

My comments:

1. Your sentence before last is: “This guy is the most catastrophic loss for me, I’ve wanted this my whole life with him”- what I see in this sentence (and in other expressions earlier in your post), is an exaggeration, a dramatization of reality. I don’t think that you wanted a relationship with him your whole life, ever since first grade, or even ever since tenth grade. I imagine that you thought about him from time to time over the years, but not all the time and ever since. There were other love interests in our life, you were otherwise occupied.

You used the word catastrophic– that’s a heavy word, as in involving great damage and suffering/ being extremely unfortunate: I don’t see the extreme misfortune here, or the great damage. I imagine that you had other losses in your life that were greater, childhood misfortunes, breakups… ?

2. “when we are together it’s insane, like mutually amazing energy”- however exciting it was for him, his emotional/ physical experience with you was not the same as yours. When a woman feels intensely about a man, and he seems to feel the same, it is easy to assume that he feels just the same. But if he felt the same as you felt, he would have been in a relationship with you at this time.

3. It looks to me that he was never really interested in a relationship with you. What happened recently was as close as he got to approaching you for a relationship but he never made it there. He told you from the beginning of the recent events that he was not interested in a relationship and he never expressed a change of mind.

I don’t think that he necessarily planned to have a FWB arrangement with you, but that he would have been okay with such an arrangement if you were okay with it too. If he never had a FWB arrangement before, what happened with you might have been his clumsy, inexperienced effort to make such arrangement happen.

What do you think?

anita

hello belle,

delete his phone number from your phone IMMEDIATELY.

buy a copy of the book “he’s just not that into you”, read it and stop initiating contact with him.

belle, there is nothing for you to be confused about.  he is not interested in you and probably never has been.  it is amazing the fantasies we can dream up.  they feel so real we somehow waste hours, years, and in my case, decades obsessing about someone who probably never cared for us that way in the first place.  it feels like love, and if we can only get him to sign up for our dream we can finally live get married, have children, etc.

in reality it becomes a habit, but it seems like true love.  in our case instead of tying a bow around the memory and filing it where it belongs in our brain and getting on with our real lives, it seems so real that we almost think it could happen.  which is  really unfortunate because we don’t realize that we are to some degree putting our lives on hold.   when you are my age, you will see this as stupid on steroids.

so now, you are trying so hard to fit this guy into your imaginary ever after that  you don’t see that there is nothing to be confused about.  you just aren’t paying any attention to what this guy is saying and doing.

the way you describe the kisses and making out makes sense if you are teenagers but not at all if you are both adults.  because an adult man does not kiss–stop–kiss stop if he has any interest in the woman.  if he has any interest he will not go silent and back pedal all the way to cleveland, he will already be where he wants to be.

i’m sorry belle.  the good news is you really wonder why you  squandered even a minute on a guy who probably would never live up to your fantasies anyway.  if you pull out now, there might be a chance that you will see him on a street some day and laugh about the play you tried so hard to cast him in.  no matter what, he sounds like a decent guy who is trying to be nice and isn’t giving you a bone so much as you are trying to extricate one from him.

stop now please.  the longer you insist on him playing out a script he neither wants or needs, the more humiliated you will feel when you force him to voice how much he needs this to stop.

please forgive, it is my intent to get you out of this now.  i am sorry but i don’t understand why you all don’t just date in the first place, i don’t understand why anybody would hang out because it really doesn’t fit with what either men or women really want.

good luck and god bless.  you  will be allright, really.