I had been set up with a guy by one of my colleagues at work. She is an amazing person and I am lucky to consider her a friend. She had another friend that she went to university with, whom she felt would be a great match for me! Excellent! Friend setups are usually far more exciting than parental setups.
We exchanged emails and instantly felt that we had a lot in common. We had a lot in common, which meant that we had some great email and phone conversations about almost everything - politics, family life, friends, religion and nothing. It was great! I was excited that he was coming up for a visit - I think he had tagged on a weekend to a conference he was attending.
My friends and I were having an evening out, and he was going to join us. But, when we met, I felt a distinct lack of chemistry. I couldn't pinpoint what it was. Was it the orange-scented cologne that threw me off? Was it because he hadn't held my hand when we went for a walk? I had no clue.
I asked him about the chemistry after the weekend, because I thought that maybe it was just me and the awkwardness of the first time two people meet in person. He had tried to stay relatively neutral and his reason for not holding hands was because he didn't want to seem eager and he knew that if he had held my hand, he would've wanted much more. Interesting...so maybe it was just me.
We continued to exchange emails and texts and supplemented that with long phone conversations...a bit more than 'just friends', but not really. I was enjoying his long-distance company, but otherwise, I didn't think that we were dating on any level.
Eventually, things fizzled out between us, but we stayed in touch thanks to the wonders of facebook. I wasn't interested in pursuing anything more than a friendship. When I moved to the UK, I would sometimes receive one-line emails from him indicating that he thought we'd be great together - it was clear that he was still keen on dating, while I wasn't.
Almost two years later, after having barely spoken to him in the 24 months prior, I received a facebook message from him. He was about to delete me from facebook as he couldn't bare to see my profile show up in his newsfeed - his friends had repeatedly told him to let go and move on with his life and not hang onto the hope that I would want to be with him, but he hadn't taken their advice (so he wrote).
I felt bad. Here was a guy who really wanted to be with me and I had no feelings for him! There were a few conversations in the past that had indicated, to me, that we would not have been great together, so, as most people would, I moved on. I never realized that he hadn't.
Would he have treated me well? Yes. Would he have done everything he could to make me happy? Yes. Would I have made him happy? Apparently so. So what was the issue? I don't know! I just didn't have feelings for him...I didn't see a future for us while he did. How do I explain that? How do I continue to tell him this without hurting him?
People always tell me "when you know, you know"...well, with him, I knew that I knew that it just wasn't him... :(
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