I ended things after three dates, and I’m still upset about him. I’m the one who called it. If I hadn’t, I think he would have. Knowing that hasn’t made the goodbye feel any better.
We’re both 40, and we met on Tinder. The chemistry was intense, we had sex, and I liked him. That last part feels almost too simple to explain how attached I became. Three dates sounds so small when I say it out loud. It doesn’t feel small now that there won’t be a fourth.
The reasons for ending it were there. Our communication styles didn’t match, and he was busy with his business. He agreed that he couldn’t give dating his full effort. I wasn’t trying to interpret a vague excuse or convince him that he had more time than he did. We could both see the problem.
He was also separated. I’d had reservations about that all along, even while I was enjoying being with him. Strong attraction didn’t make his circumstances less complicated. It just made it easier to wish those circumstances wouldn’t matter.
I’m completely sure that breaking it off was the right decision. What I hadn’t expected was how little comfort that certainty would offer. I can explain why we shouldn’t keep seeing each other without feeling any less disappointed that we won’t.
Part of what makes this hard is that he treated me well. I don’t have some awful incident to revisit whenever I miss him. I still think he’s a great guy. The things that made him appealing haven’t disappeared just because the practical reasons to stop were convincing.
I also know how I date: one connection at a time. Seeing several people at once has never felt comfortable to me. Now I’m wondering whether that helped me get more attached than I intended. All my romantic interest was going toward this one man, even though we were only beginning to know each other. Maybe I was more hopeful than I’d admitted.
The last time I felt this attracted to someone, I ended up in a situationship. That memory was part of why I took the problems seriously this time. I keep telling myself I’ve saved myself from another potentially messy arrangement, from staying because the chemistry was good while hoping the rest would somehow catch up.
But the fear underneath the sadness isn’t just that I’ll miss him. It’s that this kind of connection will be hard to find again. I know three dates can’t tell me what a relationship would have been like. They were enough, though, to give me something I wanted more of. That’s the part I’m still attached to: getting to see him again, before I had to decide that I shouldn’t.
