While we were away together for a couple of nights, the guy I’d just started seeing was matching with local women on Tinder. He did it when I wasn’t around. We were in a resort town, on a trip we had taken together, and he was still checking who else was available.
Nothing went beyond the matches, as far as I know. I suspect there simply wasn’t enough time for him to hook up with anyone. That’s my suspicion, though, not something I can prove. I don’t have a secret encounter to describe or evidence that he had sex with someone else. What I have is the matching itself, which was enough to make me uncomfortable.
We had only recently started seeing each other. I’m not describing a long relationship or a vacation with an established boyfriend. That newness is part of what makes this difficult to sort out. Going away together felt significant to me, but it clearly didn’t mean that he considered himself unavailable to other women.
His explanation was that he was still single. I can understand what that means as a description of where he thinks we stand. It doesn’t tell me why he wanted to look for local matches during the few nights we were spending away together. There’s a difference between knowing a man hasn’t committed to me and finding out he’s actively browsing for other women on our trip.
I wasn’t asking him to account for his entire life before we met. I was reacting to something happening while we were seeing each other, in the middle of time we had chosen to spend together. The location mattered, too. These weren’t just women somewhere far away; they were local to the place we were visiting. That’s why the possibility of a hookup is hard for me to dismiss, even though I can’t say one happened.
Then he called me crazy for being upset. That left me with more than the question of whether two people who have just started dating are exclusive. He was telling me how he saw his own status, and also dismissing my reaction to what he had done. Knowing he considers himself single doesn’t make his response easier to hear.
Now I’m unsure whether to keep seeing him. I don’t want to turn matches into an affair that I can’t establish, or pretend a new relationship came with promises I haven’t described. But I also can’t make myself feel fine about the trip just because he says he was free to do it. We went away together, he kept matching, and I’m left deciding whether I want another date.
