There is a particular kind of heartbreak reserved for people you never actually dated.
It isn't a breakup. There's no lease to divide, no friends to split, no favourite restaurant suddenly off-limits. Nobody asks how you're coping, because technically there's nothing to cope with. It's grief without paperwork.
Which made me wonder: if someone ends an almost perfectly, why does it still hurt?
Scott was a Kiwi. He was six foot 8. I'm six foot three, and I'm not used to looking up at anyone, so this alone felt like a plot twist. He trained horses, a job I'd assumed only existed in period dramas, which meant he worked strange hours and lived on a schedule built around animals rather than people. And, as I discovered after some light and entirely responsible stalking, he was rich. Not comfortable. Rich.
A tall, wealthy horseman from across the ditch. If he'd turned up to our first date on horseback, I wouldn't even have been surprised.
We went on four dates over about a month.
The first was ice cream, naturally. The second was wine and dinner. The third was a late night at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, wandering the halls after dark, which is about as close as Sydney gets to a scene in a French film. And the fourth was Leviticus, a gay horror film. In hindsight, a horror film named after the Bible's least gay-friendly book was probably not a great omen. At the time, I thought it was very romantic to be scared next to him.
In the grand scheme of a romantic history, four dates is nothing. It's barely long enough to learn someone's takeaway order, let alone whether they'd make a suitable long-term partner.
But four dates is long enough to start looking forward to someone's name on your phone. Long enough to talk about books. Long enough to start picturing a fifth, a sixth, and a vague, sun-dappled seventh, possibly on a property in New Zealand with horses.
Four dates is long enough to start hoping.
And hope, I've discovered, is a deeply unreasonable houseguest. It arrives uninvited, rearranges all your furniture, and then acts wounded when you ask it to leave.
I wasn't planning a wedding or naming our children. I was simply curious about what might happen if we kept going. Isn't that the entire point of dating? You meet someone, you like them, and you give the possibility a little room to breathe.
The trouble starts when you realise you're the only one holding the door open.
----
Our fifth date was meant to be dinner. Instead, he cancelled and suggested we talk about our feelings.
There are few phrases less romantic than let's talk about our feelings, particularly when you'd been planning on ordering the pasta. When a dinner date turns into a conversation about feelings, you can safely assume the menu has changed.
So we talked. Scott told me he'd love to keep seeing me, probably more platonically. If that wasn't my vibe, no stress at all.
No stress at all.
Perhaps it's a Kiwi thing. I've always wondered what it would be like to possess that kind of emotional efficiency: to notice that something isn't right, say so clearly, and get on with your evening. Meanwhile, I can spend three business days deciding whether a full stop at the end of a text constitutes a declaration of war.
To his credit, Scott was honest. He didn't lead me on. He didn't promise me anything he couldn't give. He offered friendship, let me decide whether I wanted it, and managed not to become a villain in the process. Frankly, it was very inconsiderate of him.
I said yes. Of course I did. I liked him, and losing him altogether sounded worse.
He said, "Perfect."
And that, apparently, was that.
---
Here's the thing about friendship offered at the end of a romance. It's the dating equivalent of a store credit. You came in for the full refund, and you're leaving with a voucher you'll probably never use.
Because what do you do when someone offers you a smaller version of something you wanted in full?
Do you take it, because some connection beats none? Do you tell yourself friendship is enough and hope your feelings catch up with the paperwork? Or do you walk away from someone you genuinely like, because staying close means being reminded, over and over, that they don't want you the same way?
I didn't have an elegant answer. I just knew I couldn't flick off the part of me that had been hoping for more.
And there's a small irony I couldn't ignore. For someone always complaining that he has no gay friends, I'd just been offered one. It just wasn't the one I'd ordered.
The worst part was that there was nothing to be angry about. No betrayal. No spectacular red flag I'd foolishly ignored. No story I could tell over drinks about the terrible man I'd narrowly escaped.
Just a nice guy who didn't feel the same way. It's an almost offensively ordinary experience.
And when there's no one to blame, you turn to the one person you can always find fault with: yourself.
Was I too keen? Did I give away too much, too soon? Should I have played it cooler? Was there some missing ingredient I could have supplied, if only someone had told me the recipe?
We all claim we know we're not everyone's cup of tea. But the moment someone doesn't choose us, we start interrogating the ingredients.
Scott not wanting to date me didn't mean I was unattractive, boring or fundamentally unlovable. It meant Scott didn't want to date me. It's a perfectly simple sentence. I understood it intellectually weeks before I managed to feel it.
So I wanted to try the friendship.
Not the vague, "we should grab a coffee sometime" kind. I meant actual friends. The kind who send each other articles, remember small details and slowly become part of each other's lives. We had things in common. I didn't stop finding him interesting just because he didn't want to kiss me. But, would a message now look friendly, or would it look like I was still pining? If I sent him something about a book we'd discussed, was that what friends do, or a thinly disguised attempt to reopen a door he'd politely closed?
Eventually I had to ask myself the uncomfortable question. Did I actually want to be Scott friend? Or was friendship simply a more socially acceptable way of staying close to someone I hadn't finished wanting?
They're two very different things. Only one of them is friendship.
So I gave it space. After a couple of weeks, I reached out. We chatted. It was nice. Pleasant, even. And then it quietly ended, as pleasant things so often do.
And there I was again, trying to squeeze meaning out of what was probably just an ordinary conversation between two people who'd once had four dinners. Maybe he was busy. Maybe he thought about it a fraction as much as I did. Maybe he was glad to hear from me and simply didn't feel the need to keep it going.
I couldn't know. But I did know I didn't want to keep messaging him just to check whether I still mattered.
There's a difference between making an effort and auditioning for someone's attention. The first is friendship. The second becomes a rather humiliating hobby.
So I left the ball in his court. No grand gesture. No blocking, no 🪦, no announcement of a new era of self-love. I simply stopped trying to make something happen.
Which, it turns out, is much harder than it sounds.
I think what bothered me most about Scott was how little there was to blame. When someone treats you badly, at least you get the consolation of anger. You can turn disappointment into a story about how much better off you are.
But what do you do with disappointment when nobody did anything wrong?
I suppose you let it be what it is. Not every connection is meant to become something more. Enjoying someone and wanting a relationship with them are not the same thing, no matter how much I'd like them to be.
The problem was never that I hoped Scott might like me. I like people. I get excited about them. I don't think that's a character flaw. The problem was that, once he told me where we stood, I kept looking for a version of the story where I hadn't lost anything at all.
Sometimes, though, four dates are just four dates.
I still want to fall in love. I want the person who's excited to hear from me, who suggests the next date and remembers the book I mentioned because he wants to know what I thought of it. I want that rush without spending the following week working out whether it was mutual.
I want to be chosen, yes. But I'm also trying to get better at choosing where I put my own attention. Because eventually, after enough time spent wondering whether someone wants you, you have to ask yourself a different question:
Do I actually want to keep waiting for them to?
Maybe moving on isn't deciding that someone doesn't matter. Maybe it's accepting that they can matter without needing to stay.
Not the great love story I'd hoped for. But perhaps the absence of a relationship isn't evidence of an absence in me.
Next time I meet someone I like, I'm going to try to enjoy it without working out the ending before we had confirmed the start.... No promises, though. I'm still me.