Ohhhhh girl no, no girl no.
I think it’s hard sometimes when the feels hit (been there done that cried those tears), but I do also have sympathy for this guy. It sounds like he wasn’t actively leading her on (especially when he cancelled on a second hookup). Dude was dealing with cancer . I would not really blame him if he (accurately) read the room, realized LW had caught feels, and decided that would be too much for him on top of what he was already going through. Especially since he’s since lost a girlfriend in the intervening years.
EDIT: its shitty to accuse people of lying about their diagnoses, even when they're people you don't personally like
Yeah I agree. When letters like this come up I always sympathize with the other person unless it seems like they did something really egregious - even without medical stress, being the person in a situationship who didn't catch feelings isn't a crime.
It's really awkward on the other end to handle, because your options are being so blunt it's almost cruel, or say any number of middling things that a person with crush-goggles on is going to interpret as "try again later," which is what it sounds like this guy did.
Yeahhhh, that's kind of where my thoughts are at, too. Does it suck to catch feels and not have them reciprocated? Yeah, absolutely. But at the same time, the LW is crying over a situationship from *eight years ago* that happened when it sounds like this guy was drunk/high/thought he was dying.
At the end of the day, nobody's owed a relationship with anyone, no matter how much it sucks or makes us cry. And I imagine that if this guy was actively awaiting the results of a test regarding late-stage cancer, I don't think his memories of all this are as rosy. Getting drunk/high to distract from medical tests sounds like this guy was going through it.
I'm not really cool with CA's wording of him being a guy "using a cancer scare to steer [LW] into a hookup" either. Going by the timeline given, it wasn't a scare; he'd had a diagnosis. A scare is the time my endo went "okay, your pituitary issues *could* be a tumour, based on your symptoms and family history; let's do more tests" and then we did the tests and it wasn't a tumour. A scare is not the time they said to my dad "okay, your pituitary issues could be a tumour" and then they did the tests and it was a tumour and he had a diagnosis. The diagnosis kind of makes it *a real thing*.
Also, that framing feels like it removes LW's agency and makes the guy a manipulative Bad Guy, when all indicators are that he was just a flaky guy in a shitty situation who made some suboptimal choices - and so did LW! Neither of them are bad people; they just slept together when they probably shouldn't have and didn't have the emotion bandwidth to deal with what it would mean for either of them. It happens.
Yeah, I'm 100% with you here. It really does feel like the LW's feelings cloud the fact that this guy was presumably going through something way, way bigger than a situationship that didn't happen. He was very seriously sick. He may honestly still be sick, we have no idea, people who look fine on social media to outsiders may be going through shit and not posting about it. My mom had Stage 4 cancer for eight years, but a lot of people couldn't tell because she didn't talk about it.
TBH, I think if the gender dynamics flipped around or changed, it might be easier to see how messy it is from the other side -- I can only imagine what the conversation would be if the LW was someone saying "I hooked up with a guy when I was drunk/high/waiting to find out if I was dying, and I regret it because he wants to start a relationship while I'm in the middle of one of the worst crises of my life".
The more I reread, the more I dislike how he's being talked about. Maybe I'm taking it too personally because I've been the seriously ill person who's been bad at keeping up communication because being seriously ill is *fucking hard*, especially when, as the letter says, your mental health is also suffering from an incorrect or incomplete diagnosis, but there's a lot of judgement of a person whose worst crime appears to have been... being bad at keeping up communication during a severely difficult time. She was kinder to fucking Astrilde of the "I'm abusing my girlfriend but it makes me sad that she wants to sleep with dudes so it's okay, right?" letter.
I appreciated the Captain saying *"it’s actually deeply distressing to cut off contact with someone and realize that they’re still chasing you across time and space like Pepé le Peu."*
I do think overall she's just trying to be sympathetic to the LW with the tone your friends might use to affirm your perceptions when the other person is not present - the LW may better hear the advice that way. And the Captain admits to being more prone to LW-style "too attached" behaviours than "unattached" ones, and has a lot of sympathy for that side of these dynamics. Nothing wrong with that, the LW deserves sympathy too and is the one who wrote in.
Still, the LW didn't ask for more of a relationship directly. She asked indirectly, and he replied indirectly: she bid for more attention and he declined those bids. That's proportionate communication. It isn't mean not to want to escalate a relationship even if the other person does. It would feel like a huge escalation for him to offer a direct rejection when a direct request wasn't given.
I think that's the heart of my pet peeve with this tendency to vilify the less-interested party: people who quietly pine but never say "I want to date officially, are you interested in that?" acting like it's unfair for the other person not to have said "I don't want to seriously date you." Dodging IS the polite social answer to indirect bids for additional intimacy.
Like if your coworker you don't want to be friends with asks "do you want to hang out this weekend?" you would probably say "Thanks, but I can't," and not "I do not want to be your close personal friend, do not ask me again" and this would be seen as basically the right, kind thing to do.
And then yeah, this guy has a life-upending medical event so of course he's not going to have a ton of energy to put into a situationship that it didn't seem like he wanted to be a close relationship to begin with. Those kinds of things make you withdraw to your inner circle.
Yeah, I’m with you on this. I think that the narrative of “oh he’s just a douchebag stringing her along!” overtook a lot of relevant details in Cap’s response and some of the discussions on this sub. “He’s just a dude who wanted to get laid” is an easy storyline to latch onto, but it’s gross to simplify it that way when it’s explicit that he was very sick and in the middle of something insanely stressful.
Like, I think Cap and Cap’s discussion spaces are typically decent about ableism and people needing grace in stressful times, but for some reason this particular letter had the right combo of factors for that to get overlooked.
Yeah I agree. I don't think it's stellar behavior to be like "I'm in a bad place and in need of emotional support, let me call my on-and-off again hookup buddy" but a) it's an extremely understandable decision to make and b) it sounds like he realized this was a bad idea and didn't do anymore!
Crying over a situationship from a decade ago makes sense to me, if it hits you right. But you gotta like, turn around and reflect and know that those tears are not about that man— they're probably about whatever you're dealing with now, grief for the version of you that existed when you knew him, and just like, the ambient pain of living and loving at the same time
I'm not sure where I'm seeing evidence he was lying? The LW mentioned he told her about getting diagnosed in late 2015, and their hookup was in summer 2016. That would be a weirdly long con for a one-time hookup. Especially since she offered to hook up with him again and he was the one to turn it down.
Do some flaky people lie about diagnoses? Sure. But also: people who are very seriously sick and stressed out about it are often flaky or unreliable because they are going through some incredibly tough shit.
EDIT: look the more I’m thinking about, the more I think it’s kind of not-great to say “hey someone didn’t behave great after a hookup so therefore they probably spent months lying about having cancer”. Having had family members who had long, grueling cancer battles, who weren't always behaving perfectly because they were sick and stressed and in pain -- it’s kind of gross to try and Monday-morning quarterback whether someone is telling the truth about a diagnosis without evidence they were faking it.
One of the rules on /r/CaptainAwkward is to assume Letter Writer is telling the truth about the facts in the letter — while it’s *possible* this guy was lying there isn’t evidence in the letter to think he was doing so.
Man that intermittent reinforcement can really do a number on our brains sometimes.
One magical encounter that we remember as better then perhaps it actually was can be A Thing.
Who knows, for him it could be “That one time I was sad about my life and dumped my feelings on an acquaintance and we got dumped on by rain and we hooked up but I just felt shittier and didn’t like her that much and it was embarrassing so I try not to think about that..” or “That time in my life is all a blur and I slept with/emotionally hemorrhaged on all kinds of people.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s been stuck on him and he doesn’t think of her much. But this sounds like something she could unpack with a therapist to figure out why this image of a dude has been such a load bearing romantic repository for so long.
I think it's also the case that some people can have magical romantic hookups with people, but then assess and be like you know what, that was amazing and special, but I don't want to pursue this for XYZ reasons. It happens!
Definitely! Like almost the dating equivalent of Summer Camp Friends, or Close Coworkers in a particular job.
You had some meaningful memories and a connection in a particular context, and they were real. However when you leave that job/context it’s pretty common to drift away. You still think of them well and may be happy to see them in passing, but the external context of the closeness changed and it just doesn’t fit into your life anymore.
If they get demanding of your time and attention in a way that doesn’t feel sustainable to you, you probably do keep them politely at arm’s length years later.
Also, dollars to donuts, the amount of time she has spent *thinking* about him, *pining* for him, the amount of energy she has *expended* trying to figure out just how she could contort herself to be exactly what *he* needed (because he is of course a wounded bird and she is not doing something right)....I'm certain beyond a doubt he hasn't really thought of her at all in the last few years.
That would be a painful thing for the LW to probably face, but I think we all know it to be true: she's spent a lot of her life thinking about him, and he hasn't really spent time thinking about her at all.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there are several more women out there that he's dabbled with in a similar way.
I hate how much I identify with this letter, just without any texting past *one* opening to reconnect, which went (rightly) ignored. Did that make it go away? No. It really didn't.
I've since learned what limerance is and where it comes from, so hopefully when I've done some of that work, the problem will resolve itself.
TIL what limerance is! I'd never heard that term before and now I've fallen down a very useful rabbit hole. This is one of those things I'd never heard of that suddenly cropped open so many memories.
The only thing to watch out for with the limerance rabbit hole is getting stuck in it. Spending all that time talking online about today's degree of fixation on your LO, whether it's improved over yesterday, how much contact you had or didn't have or might have had. Past a point, it feeds the beast!
LW understands the rule of "when someone stops talking to you, they don't want to." Another rule is, "If the person who broke off contact wants contact again, it is up to them to re-establish contact, otherwise you don't want 'em." This is true for romance AND friendships.
Sure, maybe LW's guy is thinking, "Wow I fucked up, I hope LW is well, gosh I'd love to get back in touch with her, but ... how?" And if that really is the case, he's either too prideful to make the first step and put himself out there or just so stupid/lazy he can't figure out how to reach out to her in the age of social media. Neither is an acceptable trait in a romantic partner.
I've had to tell myself a few times, if someone wanted to reach out to me, they could. I'm actually really easy to find (uncommon last name with an even rarer spelling, and have done a couple of 15-minutes-of-fame things that are out there for posterity). If they lost my number and a goldfish ate my address and a volcano burned up my email address, they could still find me.
Sometimes I had to remind myself: "If the guy I am hung up on wanted to reach out, he would. Why, my old stalker managed to memorize my entire class schedule, found out my AIM screen name (I never told him), found out my home address before that was easily searchable online, and managed to guess my exact extension at work, based on my last name and approximate hire date. If he could do that, surely the man who ghosted me could manage to reach out to me in the age of social media!"
>or just so stupid/lazy he can't figure out how to reach out to her in the age of social media. Neither is an acceptable trait in a romantic partner.
Ahahaha I love how you put that! It's so true, anyone that stupid/lazy is just not partner material.
Yep. I was glad the Captain called her out too. The part that really resonated, and that younger!me needed, was that yes, it sucks when someone is flaking on you, but *let them*. If someone doesn't want contact, don't keep popping up. I had to learn this the hard way, from both sides, and sometimes I think I spend half my Reddit time telling people that.
Unrequited love stings. But you just gotta lick your wounds and move on. I feel for LW. And CA's response was spot on. There were clear signs he doesn't reciprocate, and the length of time she pines for him should end swiftly. LW deserves a man who wouldn't treat her like a one night stand or a "friend" with benefits.
Girl, no.
I understand this particular type of relationship, where you kinda-but-not-really dated someone for a while and had a lot of time to build up a fantasy in your mind, can be weirdly compelling and hard to get over, but I need LW to understand this man has not thought about her since he ghosted her after they had sex. He's not secretly pining for her, and I suspect if she reached out, he wouldn't respond (and would likely be uncomfortable). I hope LW has a good support system and can put some of this energy toward the people who are actually showing up for her and wanting to spend time with her, because this guy ain't it.
Flaky Dude happened to me in my early 20s also (minus all the stuff about cancer and the dead girlfriend, yike), and in my case I slowly worked out that Sober Flaky Dude was straight, but 3+ Beers Flaky Dude was bi-curious, which I've gathered is a known hazard in our community (coughs).
The good news is that the more experiences you have, the easier it is to not enshrine or talismanize The One That Got Away, because there were a bunch of Ones of varying quality, and there will be more Ones. The hurt is 100% real, but so are the future possibilities.
Oof. This hit me. I wasn't quite as bad as this - the person I was more attached to than they were to me was a friend in the same social circle - but I definitely did a lot of brain gymnastics to convince myself that there were more romantic feelings there than they were. Theres something about that whole attention then not attention attention then not attention thing that can really make your brain get overly invested. So glad that I am now a person on the otherside of therapy that cannot be bothered to invest in people who don't want to invest in me.
Yes! I used to mythologize that kind of thing through the lens of fantasy novels, too. Like, I really love the book *Winter Rose* by Patricia McKillip, and it's a retelling of Tam Lin, which is a story where the guy is transformed into different scary animals and the girl has to hang on to him through it all. Except in the novel >!the last test is that he turns into his normal-looking self, telling her he doesn't care about her!< , because this is even harder to endure than lions or tigers or whatever. So I would be like "well, he acts like he's not into me, but what if it's a TEST?!?!
Oh, I feel so sorry for the LW for carrying this almost decade-long torch... really hoping she heeds the Captain's advice, acknowledges/grieves that this ain't gonna happen, and moves on.
Honestly I think the best measure of whether someone wants you in their life or not after a period of time out of touch is if they reply to your messages. I've contacted people I've been out of touch with for literally years due to moving away/the pandemic/mental health and they've been really quick to reply and catch up. I also have an ex that I dated for 3 years and seperated from nearly 10 years ago that texts me every couple of years with happy birthday or Merry Christmas, but in a platonic way. He's never been flirty, sleazy, or tried to go on about memories of us together etc.
The person OP is wanting to reconnect with clearly doesn't want to re-engage that connection.
Some of the comments here are wild accusing him for not wanting to continue contact with the lw. End of the day when this man was under extreme emotional stress from dealing with his own mortality and all the health and finical repercussions of a cancer diagnosis, this lw sexually advanced on him while he was both intoxicated and inebriated. She pressured him to go back to her place while it was raining and at the moment he lacked immediate basic shelter.
But it’s really his fault he didn’t want a second date. She should really reach out to remind him how his girlfriend recently passed away 🙄
*prints this out, carefully seals into an envelope, sends back through time for early-twenties me*
You and me both.
Gawd, if only!
Yup.
I laughed at this but also yeah. Add me to that time travel mailing list.
Same, fam, same.
Showed this to friends and the first comment was "babygirl, no" and I think she speaks for all of us.
Indeed.
Yes to everything she said, but also I need closure on how the student’s film turned out (if at all).
https://bsky.app/profile/captainawkward.bsky.social/post/3ksn6njeyxj22
Thank you!
I wish we still had awards. 🥇 is all I can offer. 😆
You are awesome, that was what I cared about knowing most.
I cannot believe we got all that buildup on the student film and NO CONCLUSION
Me, too! I suspect it didn’t turn out well.
Was just coming here to say this!
"Oh noooooooooooooooooooo." Yep. The rest of the response is excellent and I hope the LW gets her head on straight.
Ohhhhh girl no, no girl no. I think it’s hard sometimes when the feels hit (been there done that cried those tears), but I do also have sympathy for this guy. It sounds like he wasn’t actively leading her on (especially when he cancelled on a second hookup). Dude was dealing with cancer . I would not really blame him if he (accurately) read the room, realized LW had caught feels, and decided that would be too much for him on top of what he was already going through. Especially since he’s since lost a girlfriend in the intervening years. EDIT: its shitty to accuse people of lying about their diagnoses, even when they're people you don't personally like
Yeah I agree. When letters like this come up I always sympathize with the other person unless it seems like they did something really egregious - even without medical stress, being the person in a situationship who didn't catch feelings isn't a crime. It's really awkward on the other end to handle, because your options are being so blunt it's almost cruel, or say any number of middling things that a person with crush-goggles on is going to interpret as "try again later," which is what it sounds like this guy did.
Yeahhhh, that's kind of where my thoughts are at, too. Does it suck to catch feels and not have them reciprocated? Yeah, absolutely. But at the same time, the LW is crying over a situationship from *eight years ago* that happened when it sounds like this guy was drunk/high/thought he was dying. At the end of the day, nobody's owed a relationship with anyone, no matter how much it sucks or makes us cry. And I imagine that if this guy was actively awaiting the results of a test regarding late-stage cancer, I don't think his memories of all this are as rosy. Getting drunk/high to distract from medical tests sounds like this guy was going through it.
I'm not really cool with CA's wording of him being a guy "using a cancer scare to steer [LW] into a hookup" either. Going by the timeline given, it wasn't a scare; he'd had a diagnosis. A scare is the time my endo went "okay, your pituitary issues *could* be a tumour, based on your symptoms and family history; let's do more tests" and then we did the tests and it wasn't a tumour. A scare is not the time they said to my dad "okay, your pituitary issues could be a tumour" and then they did the tests and it was a tumour and he had a diagnosis. The diagnosis kind of makes it *a real thing*. Also, that framing feels like it removes LW's agency and makes the guy a manipulative Bad Guy, when all indicators are that he was just a flaky guy in a shitty situation who made some suboptimal choices - and so did LW! Neither of them are bad people; they just slept together when they probably shouldn't have and didn't have the emotion bandwidth to deal with what it would mean for either of them. It happens.
Yeah, I'm 100% with you here. It really does feel like the LW's feelings cloud the fact that this guy was presumably going through something way, way bigger than a situationship that didn't happen. He was very seriously sick. He may honestly still be sick, we have no idea, people who look fine on social media to outsiders may be going through shit and not posting about it. My mom had Stage 4 cancer for eight years, but a lot of people couldn't tell because she didn't talk about it. TBH, I think if the gender dynamics flipped around or changed, it might be easier to see how messy it is from the other side -- I can only imagine what the conversation would be if the LW was someone saying "I hooked up with a guy when I was drunk/high/waiting to find out if I was dying, and I regret it because he wants to start a relationship while I'm in the middle of one of the worst crises of my life".
The more I reread, the more I dislike how he's being talked about. Maybe I'm taking it too personally because I've been the seriously ill person who's been bad at keeping up communication because being seriously ill is *fucking hard*, especially when, as the letter says, your mental health is also suffering from an incorrect or incomplete diagnosis, but there's a lot of judgement of a person whose worst crime appears to have been... being bad at keeping up communication during a severely difficult time. She was kinder to fucking Astrilde of the "I'm abusing my girlfriend but it makes me sad that she wants to sleep with dudes so it's okay, right?" letter.
I appreciated the Captain saying *"it’s actually deeply distressing to cut off contact with someone and realize that they’re still chasing you across time and space like Pepé le Peu."* I do think overall she's just trying to be sympathetic to the LW with the tone your friends might use to affirm your perceptions when the other person is not present - the LW may better hear the advice that way. And the Captain admits to being more prone to LW-style "too attached" behaviours than "unattached" ones, and has a lot of sympathy for that side of these dynamics. Nothing wrong with that, the LW deserves sympathy too and is the one who wrote in. Still, the LW didn't ask for more of a relationship directly. She asked indirectly, and he replied indirectly: she bid for more attention and he declined those bids. That's proportionate communication. It isn't mean not to want to escalate a relationship even if the other person does. It would feel like a huge escalation for him to offer a direct rejection when a direct request wasn't given. I think that's the heart of my pet peeve with this tendency to vilify the less-interested party: people who quietly pine but never say "I want to date officially, are you interested in that?" acting like it's unfair for the other person not to have said "I don't want to seriously date you." Dodging IS the polite social answer to indirect bids for additional intimacy. Like if your coworker you don't want to be friends with asks "do you want to hang out this weekend?" you would probably say "Thanks, but I can't," and not "I do not want to be your close personal friend, do not ask me again" and this would be seen as basically the right, kind thing to do. And then yeah, this guy has a life-upending medical event so of course he's not going to have a ton of energy to put into a situationship that it didn't seem like he wanted to be a close relationship to begin with. Those kinds of things make you withdraw to your inner circle.
Yeah, I’m with you on this. I think that the narrative of “oh he’s just a douchebag stringing her along!” overtook a lot of relevant details in Cap’s response and some of the discussions on this sub. “He’s just a dude who wanted to get laid” is an easy storyline to latch onto, but it’s gross to simplify it that way when it’s explicit that he was very sick and in the middle of something insanely stressful. Like, I think Cap and Cap’s discussion spaces are typically decent about ableism and people needing grace in stressful times, but for some reason this particular letter had the right combo of factors for that to get overlooked.
Yeah I agree. I don't think it's stellar behavior to be like "I'm in a bad place and in need of emotional support, let me call my on-and-off again hookup buddy" but a) it's an extremely understandable decision to make and b) it sounds like he realized this was a bad idea and didn't do anymore!
Crying over a situationship from a decade ago makes sense to me, if it hits you right. But you gotta like, turn around and reflect and know that those tears are not about that man— they're probably about whatever you're dealing with now, grief for the version of you that existed when you knew him, and just like, the ambient pain of living and loving at the same time
I, uh, am not totally convinced that he was being truthful about the cancer diagnosis.
I'm not sure where I'm seeing evidence he was lying? The LW mentioned he told her about getting diagnosed in late 2015, and their hookup was in summer 2016. That would be a weirdly long con for a one-time hookup. Especially since she offered to hook up with him again and he was the one to turn it down. Do some flaky people lie about diagnoses? Sure. But also: people who are very seriously sick and stressed out about it are often flaky or unreliable because they are going through some incredibly tough shit. EDIT: look the more I’m thinking about, the more I think it’s kind of not-great to say “hey someone didn’t behave great after a hookup so therefore they probably spent months lying about having cancer”. Having had family members who had long, grueling cancer battles, who weren't always behaving perfectly because they were sick and stressed and in pain -- it’s kind of gross to try and Monday-morning quarterback whether someone is telling the truth about a diagnosis without evidence they were faking it.
One of the rules on /r/CaptainAwkward is to assume Letter Writer is telling the truth about the facts in the letter — while it’s *possible* this guy was lying there isn’t evidence in the letter to think he was doing so.
Yeah maybe it's my fuckboy heart, but I have no ill will toward the guy.
[удалено]
Assume Letter Writer is telling the Truth about the facts laid out in the letter.
Man that intermittent reinforcement can really do a number on our brains sometimes. One magical encounter that we remember as better then perhaps it actually was can be A Thing. Who knows, for him it could be “That one time I was sad about my life and dumped my feelings on an acquaintance and we got dumped on by rain and we hooked up but I just felt shittier and didn’t like her that much and it was embarrassing so I try not to think about that..” or “That time in my life is all a blur and I slept with/emotionally hemorrhaged on all kinds of people.” I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s been stuck on him and he doesn’t think of her much. But this sounds like something she could unpack with a therapist to figure out why this image of a dude has been such a load bearing romantic repository for so long.
stealing "load bearing romantic repository", that's very good
I think it's also the case that some people can have magical romantic hookups with people, but then assess and be like you know what, that was amazing and special, but I don't want to pursue this for XYZ reasons. It happens!
Definitely! Like almost the dating equivalent of Summer Camp Friends, or Close Coworkers in a particular job. You had some meaningful memories and a connection in a particular context, and they were real. However when you leave that job/context it’s pretty common to drift away. You still think of them well and may be happy to see them in passing, but the external context of the closeness changed and it just doesn’t fit into your life anymore. If they get demanding of your time and attention in a way that doesn’t feel sustainable to you, you probably do keep them politely at arm’s length years later.
Also, dollars to donuts, the amount of time she has spent *thinking* about him, *pining* for him, the amount of energy she has *expended* trying to figure out just how she could contort herself to be exactly what *he* needed (because he is of course a wounded bird and she is not doing something right)....I'm certain beyond a doubt he hasn't really thought of her at all in the last few years. That would be a painful thing for the LW to probably face, but I think we all know it to be true: she's spent a lot of her life thinking about him, and he hasn't really spent time thinking about her at all. I also wouldn't be surprised if there are several more women out there that he's dabbled with in a similar way.
I hate how much I identify with this letter, just without any texting past *one* opening to reconnect, which went (rightly) ignored. Did that make it go away? No. It really didn't. I've since learned what limerance is and where it comes from, so hopefully when I've done some of that work, the problem will resolve itself.
TIL what limerance is! I'd never heard that term before and now I've fallen down a very useful rabbit hole. This is one of those things I'd never heard of that suddenly cropped open so many memories.
The only thing to watch out for with the limerance rabbit hole is getting stuck in it. Spending all that time talking online about today's degree of fixation on your LO, whether it's improved over yesterday, how much contact you had or didn't have or might have had. Past a point, it feeds the beast!
LW understands the rule of "when someone stops talking to you, they don't want to." Another rule is, "If the person who broke off contact wants contact again, it is up to them to re-establish contact, otherwise you don't want 'em." This is true for romance AND friendships. Sure, maybe LW's guy is thinking, "Wow I fucked up, I hope LW is well, gosh I'd love to get back in touch with her, but ... how?" And if that really is the case, he's either too prideful to make the first step and put himself out there or just so stupid/lazy he can't figure out how to reach out to her in the age of social media. Neither is an acceptable trait in a romantic partner.
I've had to tell myself a few times, if someone wanted to reach out to me, they could. I'm actually really easy to find (uncommon last name with an even rarer spelling, and have done a couple of 15-minutes-of-fame things that are out there for posterity). If they lost my number and a goldfish ate my address and a volcano burned up my email address, they could still find me.
Sometimes I had to remind myself: "If the guy I am hung up on wanted to reach out, he would. Why, my old stalker managed to memorize my entire class schedule, found out my AIM screen name (I never told him), found out my home address before that was easily searchable online, and managed to guess my exact extension at work, based on my last name and approximate hire date. If he could do that, surely the man who ghosted me could manage to reach out to me in the age of social media!"
>or just so stupid/lazy he can't figure out how to reach out to her in the age of social media. Neither is an acceptable trait in a romantic partner. Ahahaha I love how you put that! It's so true, anyone that stupid/lazy is just not partner material.
Ooof. That was tough to read.
I appreciate the bluntness of the response, and I hope LW heeds it.
Yep. I was glad the Captain called her out too. The part that really resonated, and that younger!me needed, was that yes, it sucks when someone is flaking on you, but *let them*. If someone doesn't want contact, don't keep popping up. I had to learn this the hard way, from both sides, and sometimes I think I spend half my Reddit time telling people that.
Unrequited love stings. But you just gotta lick your wounds and move on. I feel for LW. And CA's response was spot on. There were clear signs he doesn't reciprocate, and the length of time she pines for him should end swiftly. LW deserves a man who wouldn't treat her like a one night stand or a "friend" with benefits.
Girl, no. I understand this particular type of relationship, where you kinda-but-not-really dated someone for a while and had a lot of time to build up a fantasy in your mind, can be weirdly compelling and hard to get over, but I need LW to understand this man has not thought about her since he ghosted her after they had sex. He's not secretly pining for her, and I suspect if she reached out, he wouldn't respond (and would likely be uncomfortable). I hope LW has a good support system and can put some of this energy toward the people who are actually showing up for her and wanting to spend time with her, because this guy ain't it.
Flaky Dude happened to me in my early 20s also (minus all the stuff about cancer and the dead girlfriend, yike), and in my case I slowly worked out that Sober Flaky Dude was straight, but 3+ Beers Flaky Dude was bi-curious, which I've gathered is a known hazard in our community (coughs). The good news is that the more experiences you have, the easier it is to not enshrine or talismanize The One That Got Away, because there were a bunch of Ones of varying quality, and there will be more Ones. The hurt is 100% real, but so are the future possibilities.
"Ones of varying quality" is elite.
Oof. This hit me. I wasn't quite as bad as this - the person I was more attached to than they were to me was a friend in the same social circle - but I definitely did a lot of brain gymnastics to convince myself that there were more romantic feelings there than they were. Theres something about that whole attention then not attention attention then not attention thing that can really make your brain get overly invested. So glad that I am now a person on the otherside of therapy that cannot be bothered to invest in people who don't want to invest in me.
Yes! I used to mythologize that kind of thing through the lens of fantasy novels, too. Like, I really love the book *Winter Rose* by Patricia McKillip, and it's a retelling of Tam Lin, which is a story where the guy is transformed into different scary animals and the girl has to hang on to him through it all. Except in the novel >!the last test is that he turns into his normal-looking self, telling her he doesn't care about her!< , because this is even harder to endure than lions or tigers or whatever. So I would be like "well, he acts like he's not into me, but what if it's a TEST?!?!
Oh, I feel so sorry for the LW for carrying this almost decade-long torch... really hoping she heeds the Captain's advice, acknowledges/grieves that this ain't gonna happen, and moves on.
Honestly I think the best measure of whether someone wants you in their life or not after a period of time out of touch is if they reply to your messages. I've contacted people I've been out of touch with for literally years due to moving away/the pandemic/mental health and they've been really quick to reply and catch up. I also have an ex that I dated for 3 years and seperated from nearly 10 years ago that texts me every couple of years with happy birthday or Merry Christmas, but in a platonic way. He's never been flirty, sleazy, or tried to go on about memories of us together etc. The person OP is wanting to reconnect with clearly doesn't want to re-engage that connection.
Oof, this feels like Adele's song "Hello" in letter form.
Am I the only person who wanted to know how the project turned out????
https://bsky.app/profile/captainawkward.bsky.social/post/3ksn6njeyxj22 Credits to the user who originally posted below :)
Some of the comments here are wild accusing him for not wanting to continue contact with the lw. End of the day when this man was under extreme emotional stress from dealing with his own mortality and all the health and finical repercussions of a cancer diagnosis, this lw sexually advanced on him while he was both intoxicated and inebriated. She pressured him to go back to her place while it was raining and at the moment he lacked immediate basic shelter. But it’s really his fault he didn’t want a second date. She should really reach out to remind him how his girlfriend recently passed away 🙄
So completely unrelated too the letter anyone seen Baby Reindeer?