I hang up my boots for a while after meeting someone in real life
I’m back in London now. I’ve been back for about six weeks.
It’s been a tough couple of years all things considered, and since being back in the UK I have been bullied out of my job and fallen out with a valued friend.
It isn’t all so desperate; I’m having a beautiful summer, catching up with friends, progressing future plans. But as usual, life is a bit of a roller-coaster, and I could really do without major new stressors.
If only we got to say ‘nothing new for three months please while I recalibrate from that last difficult thing’.
I am feeling quite weary, basically. I think a lot of people are.
Revisiting this previous post, my dating experience in Italy was quite something. The number of times I said to myself ‘what the f*** just happened’?! I didn’t mention it previously, but even my landlord was a creep, turning up at my bedroom door with my knickers from the dryer and offering to try them on, slapping my ass another time. He’d seen my profile pop up on Feeld and I think he’s one of those guys that interprets ‘open minded’ as meaning ‘up for it – with literally anyone’.
That wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back though.
So what was?
Well, I met a guy in the wild. And I mean truly in the wild – not some sex pest using couchsurfing to hit on female travellers.
No, I met Giacomo at a drinks thing, spotting him sitting alone and slinking over to chat. He was quiet, but not painfully shy, and I liked him straight away. He didn’t rush to fill silences, and wasn’t scanning or working the room like many others. He seemed present, nicely contained, and meandering through small talk I could see we had a lot in common.
I met him several more times socially before I geared up to ask him out, getting a little nudge from a friend, as I often do. I’m always nervous about asking people out, and while I have done it face-to-face, sometimes, yes, I use the internet to avoid a possible in-person rejection. This is one of the main things the internet is actually useful for, the others including animal content and memes.
Of course, he said yes. I say ‘of course’ because whenever I’ve had the slightest sense there is mutual attraction and acted on it I’ve been proven right.
So he said yes and I was very excited, and we went out a few times. And Christ, it felt good. It felt so good to meet someone in real life and to go into that first date feeling I’d already got a bit of a read on his character, that I could be relatively confident he was a decent guy and already fancied him. It was that delicious combination of safety and excitement, and very different to going on an app date.
Getting to know Giac (Giac? Mo? I prefer the latter, not that it matters now), there was much that impressed and interested me. Like me, he’d left a long-term relationship, got a rebound out of the way and seemed to be having a glow-up. And he listened, he cut the small-talk, asked me important questions and really listened to the answers.
There were pink flags. He was very full-on about how much he liked me in a way that, while flattering, I thought premature. There were also hints of insecurity, and I wondered how much to share about my sexuality and its role in my life; he didn’t seem too experienced or confident there, and I’d got the impression many Italian guys are intimidated by sexually assertive women (yawn) so I intended to keep an eye on it.
I still thought we had potential, and I wanted to see him again.
And then it swiftly unravelled. Having previously messaged me daily (asking if this was too much and saying he wanted to talk even more, the keen bean), his communication dropped off without warning. With probing from me, he said he was concerned about me going back to the UK and leaving him thinking about me, missing me. He felt unsure about going deeper on this basis.
I was disappointed, but impressed too, actually. As a friend pointed out, he wasn’t rushing in hard like a panting 25 year-old, he was showing maturity, and giving the thing the respect it deserved.
I made it clear I was planning to return to Italy, but didn’t press too hard. I respected his feelings. And then he just…disappeared. My attempts to continue or round off the conversation were met with opaque, dramatic responses. I asked if we could have a quick drink and a chat – thinking would be good to get our feelings and concerns out on the table and, you know, end things, or put them on ice, whatever. His response – his final message – was so short, so vague – ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea’ or something like that.
Oof.
Let me be totally clear; what bothered me was not that he’d decided to back away, it was the suddenness of the change, and the intensity of it; red hot to ice cold in the blink of an eye. We hadn’t had many dates, but we’d clearly been sizing each other up for something meaningful, and he’d been pretty full-on about how much he liked me, then he just pulled up the drawbridge and stopped talking.
The creeps, liars and f**k-boys I encounter dating men leave me angry and weary. But these ones are a real punch to the stomach. Or the heart, I suppose. You get a little glimmer of hope; a glimpse of that connection you are longing for. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve been on one date with the person or five, or none at all. It doesn’t matter that you’ve got your eyes wide open, appraising the real person before you, not projecting some hallowed vision. When you want that deep connection, the big love, and you get that little spark of hope and it dies out, man, it hurts.
These things are unavoidable, of course. Luckily with this one I didn’t have to make much effort to reframe it. Actually it didn’t require any reframing, I told myself straight away this guy didn’t have some important things I wanted, and I didn’t need to do much convincing.
I liked him though, and I did feel sad.
Despite that, I still made the most of my last weeks in Florence. I got out there, met new friends, hit the sex club, because a girl’s gotta eat. And I decided to take a little break from dating. Back in London I’m focusing on me, and honouring the fragility I’m currently experiencing. I’ll drag my battered, jaded heart back out there at some point and meet that hot guy with a summer home in Sicily, I’m sure of it.