It's Not Me?

My hopes of being romantically involved with a man in the nearest future just got crushed. I received a very long e-mail at lunchtime. You thought I was going to say ‘a letter’ didn‘t you? Well, forget everything you read in the old romances, e-mail is the accepted form these days. In his defence, this long e-mail was a response to a somewhat spontaneous Facebook message from yours truly, asking why the hell we didn‘t take our sleeping arrangements a bit further and ventured on going on a proper date to see if that would lead us anywhere interesting? Just to check if there might be something there other than what had been going on for a few weeks, and was causing me to grow a little fond of this divorced father of two in his mid-forties.

He took three days contemplating his reply, which by then was completely unnecessary. As if I hadn‘t realised what the answer was NOT going to be. It was pretty obvious that on reading my message it had NOT dawned on him that he loved me passionately and had NOT rushed to buy me flowers, run to my office to sweep me up in his arms, showering me with kisses before dragging me to the airport to surprise me with a romantic mini-break in Paris where he’d propose... No, he was probably struggling for three days with how to word it nicely to me that he just thought I was a good shag. Which I am.

Back to the actual e-mail. Most of it was a sort of a philosophical reflection on whether he was in fact fit to ever be in a relationship again. He felt that in the past he had always ended up being an arsehole and claimed he simply never understood women. And since he had two children to think of, he thought it best just to remain single and put all his energy into raising them. So, ‘de facto’, he had decided to stay out of relationships for the rest of his life and therefore it would be unfair to me to try and make something more out of what we had.

I sort of understood him, despite feeling sorry for him a bit. I mean, not everybody wants to be in a relationship, especially if you’ve already tried it and had kids. So I could see his point of view - and was just starting to think of a nice reply where I would thank him for being so sincere and honest when I read the last sentence. ‘But who knows, maybe I’ll meet someone tomorrow and fall in love like a fool, all over again, eh?’

Idiot! He had almost pulled it off but then screwed everything up right at the bottom. And I thought men were supposed to exceed women in logical thinking? You fool. If you’re open to the mere possibility of falling in love again, without being able to do anything about it, then the reason why you don’t want to date me is NOT that you’ve ruled relationships out entirely. It’s that you simply don’t fancy me! Why didn’t you just say so? It would have been a perfectly legitimate reason! God, he might just as well have written ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ over and over again down a few lines and then ‘P.S. Actually, it is you.’  Idiot, idiot, IDIOT!

Of course, I didn’t say any of this to him in my reply, he would think I was one of those hysterical, crazy women! No I just wrote: ‘OK then, my place or yours tonight?’ I’m sooo co-dependent.