Eleven months here, three meetings, and everybody disappears at the same moment
Posted as vanishes_same_point
- Looking for
- somebody who will say no out loud rather than simply stopping
- Experience
- Sixteen years, though you would not guess it from the last eleven months.
- Around
- the city centre, Birmingham
It happens after the first meeting goes well. We talk for two hours, we both leave saying that was good, there are messages the next day, and then within a week the replies get shorter and then they stop altogether. Three times, three different people, the identical shape each time.
Fifty two, city centre, sixteen years of doing this elsewhere and eleven months of doing almost none of it here.
I have worked through the obvious explanations. I have had a friend read my messages. I have considered that I am simply not what people were hoping for in person, which is entirely possible and which I could live with if anybody said it. What I find difficult is the format, in which the polite thing has apparently become saying nothing whatsoever.
So I am asking for something small and slightly odd. If we meet and you decide against it, tell me. One line. You do not owe me a reason, I will not ask for one and I will not argue with it. I would simply rather know than spend a fortnight deciding whether to send another message.
Otherwise what I want is ordinary enough. One person, a structure we build slowly, something measured in years. I am not angry and I would hate this to read as a man complaining about being turned down, because being turned down is completely fine. It is the vanishing that has worn me out.