After I told her I was done, she began telling me how well I had treated her. I was a perfect gentleman. No man had been so good to her. She wanted to know how she could show her appreciation, and how much she desired me. A little earlier, my attempt to flirt had prompted a page of texts about men wanting her only for sex.
I’m 53; she’s 52. We had been dating for two months and had recently agreed to be exclusive. Within a couple of weeks of that agreement, we were breaking up. There had been seven dates, sex, and talk of traveling together. I had sent flowers and put thought into elaborate dates. From where I stood, there was something here worth building.
We were also long distance, which made the time between visits matter. Phone calls weren’t working: she didn’t pick up when I called, and scheduled calls fell through. That left texts and the occasions when we could see each other. I wanted some flirtation in the space between those dates, some sense that we still wanted each other when we weren’t in the same room.
In person, she had asked me specific questions about what I liked sexually and what I wanted her to do. So a message about wanting to understand what turned her on didn’t seem, to me, like introducing a subject we had never discussed. I thought I was expressing interest in the woman I was dating. She received it as evidence of something much less personal.
She told me men only wanted her for sex and that she would rather be alone than deal with that. I can accept that a text I intended as flirtation might land badly. What troubled me was how quickly it became a judgment about what I wanted from her, with everything else between us apparently falling out of view.
Something similar had happened before. I had already explained that these exchanges didn’t feel like conversations with me; they felt as though I was being answered for something else. That was my impression, not an explanation of her past. I had also told her that I disliked being spoken to that way. This latest exchange, along with a couple of other problems, brought me to the point of ending it.
Then came the reversal. She said that if she had known flirting by text mattered to me, she would have done it. But I wasn’t looking for her to perform something she had just described as deeply upsetting. Once she had made that boundary clear, I wasn’t going to argue her into crossing it. Her sudden willingness didn’t settle what had happened between us.
This was the second time that year I had heard a woman describe me as an exceptionally good partner after I broke up with her. The two women came from different countries and cultures, with different careers and backgrounds. I couldn’t find an obvious connection beyond my own presence in both relationships. I wondered whether losing the relationship changed what they could see in it, but I couldn’t know.
She is asking me to take her back. I’m not going to. I’m still trying to understand why the appreciation arrived so clearly after I had decided to leave.
