A fictionalized relationship account.
I was 51; he was 50. Over eight months, what began as friends with benefits became an exclusive relationship, complete with conversations about living together and getting married.
Three months into exclusivity, he said we were incompatible. We returned to a casual arrangement and explicitly dropped exclusivity. That detail matters: seeing someone else afterward was not, by itself, a breach of our new agreement.
The difficulty was what he had left out. While helping him download concert tickets, I saw a message from another woman. When I asked about it, he admitted that wanting to pursue her had been the real reason for ending our relationship.
She was an old high-school girlfriend. Soon she was visiting on weekends, while he and I continued seeing each other. He encouraged me to speak with her, but she did not let me into his apartment when I arrived. I left without the clarifying conversation I had imagined.
Money was tangled into the arrangement too. He explained my continued presence to her as a matter of loan repayment. I understood our involvement very differently. Being described as an administrative obligation was a particularly unpleasant way to discover how little of the same story we were sharing.
I worried about what she was giving him, but I did not know the full terms of their relationship or finances. I did know that I was still hoping for something our casual agreement no longer promised.
Any outstanding money needed a clear repayment arrangement of its own. My romantic hopes needed an honest assessment. Keeping the two tied together had allowed every visit to feel like a possibility, even when nothing had actually changed.
