Last Tuesday, we had lunch with a breathtaking view of the hills. Afterward, she asked me not to contact her for a while. Quite a while. She said she was going through a difficult stretch and needed to figure out what she wanted from life.
I’m 45, and I’m single, I guess. That last part has become surprisingly hard to say with any confidence. I don’t know whether we’re taking a break, approaching an ending, or already on the other side of one.
We met online and gradually got to know each other. There was a ten-year age gap, but so many shared interests that conversation came easily. For two years, we saw each other a couple of times a month: lunches, dinners, walks, new places, intimacy. We gave each other room. I liked the ease of it, the feeling that neither of us had to force the pace.
Now I keep wondering what was happening inside that space. Why hadn’t she mentioned this sooner? Why that Tuesday? Had I missed something? I can revisit a perfectly good memory and somehow turn it into evidence I failed to examine.
When friends ask me for relationship advice, I usually have words ready. Feel what you feel. Keep living. Don’t let sadness take over every meal, every night, every conversation. From a comfortable distance, I can make heartbreak sound almost manageable.
Now my own advice feels difficult to pick up. There’s a heavy emptiness where the next lunch or walk used to be, and my mind keeps looking for something to do about it.
Dating apps come to mind, followed immediately by doubt. It took me ten years to meet someone like her. How long would it take again? And what would I be bringing to a new person right now, when so much of my attention is still with someone who has asked for distance?
I’ve been hurt before. Somehow, I can remember the pain more clearly than the way I eventually got through it.
I want the healing to move faster. I also don’t know exactly what I’m healing from yet. So I’m the one asking for help this time, without a tidy answer waiting at the end.
