He tried to add me on Instagram four times. I left every request unanswered. I didn’t accept him, didn’t decline him, and told myself I was avoiding more hurt. Now, more than a week after he stopped trying, I keep wondering whether I shut the door on a relationship I still wanted.
We’re both 37, and we had been dating for four months. On a Monday, he told me he no longer wanted us to be exclusive. He still wanted us in each other’s lives. Those two things may have made sense together to him. To me, they sounded like losing the part I cared about while being asked to keep the rest available.
I stopped answering two days later. There had already been circumstances during those four months that left me hurt, and he knew that. After he ended exclusivity, I wanted something from him that acknowledged what had happened between us. His messages didn’t feel substantial enough. I read them and felt as though he wanted to keep me as an option. That was my impression, not something he admitted.
Then came the Instagram requests, spread across the following Sunday and Monday. I pretended I hadn’t seen them. At the time, accepting felt like agreeing to a kind of contact that wouldn’t change anything. Declining felt like making a bigger statement than I was ready to make. Leaving them there let me postpone both.
The awkward truth is that I wasn’t completely unwilling to hear from him. If he had said something that sounded like regret, or made a more meaningful effort to work things out, I would have been much more open to answering. I didn’t just want another notification. I wanted a reason to believe his decision wasn’t the last word on us.
But I never gave him that distinction. From his side, there were messages I didn’t answer and requests I didn’t acknowledge. I can see why he might have stopped. I also don’t know what he meant by continuing to reach out. Contact alone didn’t tell me that he wanted exclusivity back, and I couldn’t make it mean that just because I missed him.
Now I worry about how reaching out would look. Would he think I only care when he goes quiet, after ignoring him while he was trying? Waiting for him to understand what I wanted has left me with no idea what he understood at all. Meanwhile, I catch myself imagining him thinking about other women. I don’t know that he is. The thought still makes me want to retreat again.
What I want is embarrassingly simple to admit: I wish he missed me, loved me, and felt that being with me was something worth reconsidering. I want him to remember that I was good to him. That wish hasn’t disappeared just because I can explain why his messages weren’t enough.
The requests have stopped. I still haven’t reached out. And I keep thinking about the small reply I could have sent when he was still asking to be let back in.
