At around eleven on Saturday night, I saw my boyfriend in an Instagram story from a bar. A few hours earlier, he had canceled our dinner because he felt awful and had a terrible headache. I had told him to rest. Now I was looking at a night out I hadn’t known was happening.
My first thought was that the video might be old. But the story had just been posted, and there he was with his friends.
We’ve been together for almost a year. He’s twenty-four; I’m twenty-three. We don’t live together, and our work schedules mean we usually see each other once or twice a week. Dinner wasn’t some huge occasion, but it was time we had set aside for each other. I’d booked a restaurant he had wanted to try for months. I was looking forward to taking him there.
His message arrived around six thirty. He said he felt terrible and asked to move dinner to another day. I was disappointed, but being disappointed didn’t mean I thought he should drag himself out while sick. I told him to get some rest, and he thanked me. As far as I knew, that was how his evening was going to end.
After seeing the story, I texted to ask whether he was feeling better. He said he was, a little, and asked why. When I mentioned that he was supposed to be sick, he seemed confused. I explained that I had seen his friend’s post. His first response was just ‘oh.’ Then he said he’d started feeling better and his friends had talked him into going out.
That could be true. Several hours had passed. I can’t know exactly how he felt at six thirty or when he decided he was up for leaving home. Seeing him at a bar doesn’t prove that the headache was an excuse. Still, I was left wondering whether he had wanted to cancel our date all along and hadn’t wanted to say so.
I told him he could have let me know. His answer was that it wasn’t that deep. That stung more than the picture of him out with his friends. I was trying to explain why the change bothered me, and he treated the explanation itself as excessive.
I don’t expect us to spend every available evening together. He can want a night with his friends. If he didn’t want dinner, I would rather have heard that than spent the evening believing he was too unwell to go anywhere. What unsettles me is having to piece together his plans from someone else’s post, then being told I’m controlling for asking about the difference.
The next morning, he texted as though nothing had happened and asked whether I wanted to hang out that evening. I said I wasn’t in the mood and needed some space. He thinks I’m making too much of it and says he shouldn’t have to explain everything he does.
