The Beginning (REFLECTION)

When I think about the woman who opened that message now, I don’t think of her as vulnerable in the way the word is often used. I wasn’t broken, desperate or searching for somebody to rescue me. I had already survived the ending of a long relationship and, although I was lonely, I was looking forward.

I wanted love again.

Perhaps more importantly, I still believed I was good at it.

I thought patience was one of my strengths. I was proud of my capacity to understand another person, to forgive mistakes, to work through difficulties rather than walking away from them. Fifteen years in a mostly loving relationship had taught me that lasting love wasn’t something that simply happened to you. It required compromise, generosity and the willingness to remain curious about another person’s experience.

Those were qualities I valued in myself.

I couldn’t have known then that our greatest strengths can become complicated things when they meet the wrong circumstances. Patience can sometimes keep us waiting long after something has begun to hurt. Empathy can encourage us to search for explanations when perhaps we should be looking more closely at behaviour. Forgiveness can be beautiful, but without change on the other side of it, it can become permission to try again.

I knew none of that when Steve appeared on my screen.

What I did know was that I wanted something different from what I had just left behind. I wanted companionship and excitement, but I also wanted security. I wanted someone settled. Someone who knew what he wanted. Someone with whom I wouldn’t have to struggle quite so hard to build an ordinary life.

And before Steve had written a single word to me, I had already begun constructing a version of him.

It wasn’t foolish. We all do it.

A handful of photographs and a dating profile can only provide fragments, so the mind supplies the rest. I saw intelligence, humour and adventure. I saw someone attractive and interesting. I saw a property developer and translated that into independence and stability. I imagined yoga and healthy food from photographs that had never actually promised me either.

Psychologists sometimes talk about projection in much more complicated circumstances, but there is an ordinary version of it too. When information is incomplete, we fill the spaces with our own expectations, preferences and hopes.

Steve was doing exactly the same thing with me.

I sometimes wonder what he imagined when he looked at my photographs.

What did he think I might offer him?

Perhaps he simply thought I was attractive and interesting. Perhaps, after his own experiences, he was lonely too. Perhaps there was something about my warmth or enthusiasm that felt particularly inviting. Perhaps neither of us was doing anything more psychologically interesting than two single people becoming unexpectedly excited about each other.

I don’t want hindsight to steal that possibility from us.

Because something genuine happened during those first conversations. Whatever difficulties came later, I don’t believe the connection I felt existed only in my imagination. We were fascinated by each other. We made each other laugh. We wanted to know more.

And there is something intoxicating about being wanted by somebody you had already decided was unlikely to want you.

Only days earlier, dating had left me wondering whether I was attractive enough, interesting enough, perhaps simply enough. Then the man I considered least likely to respond wasn’t merely interested; he seemed exceptionally interested.

Of course that affected me.

His attention didn’t manufacture my attraction to him, but it amplified it. After the ambiguity and disappearing acts of the men before him, Steve’s enthusiasm felt wonderfully uncomplicated.

Here was someone who wasn’t making me guess.

Or so I thought.

Looking back, I’m interested in how quickly we began exchanging pieces of ourselves. There is an intimacy peculiar to meeting online: two strangers can reveal things through a screen that might take considerably longer to emerge across a table. By the time you finally stand in front of each other, you can feel as though you’re meeting somebody you already know.

But knowing about someone and knowing them are very different things.

At that point, neither Steve nor I could possibly know who the other would become inside a relationship. We knew the stories we told about ourselves. We knew what we hoped for. We knew what attracted us.

Everything else would have to reveal itself slowly.

There is a temptation, knowing what I know now, to return to those first messages searching for clues—to identify the moment when I should have known better.

I don’t want to tell the story that way.

There was no reason for the woman sitting with her phone on 23 December 2020 to know where any of this was going.

She had met an interesting man.

He seemed equally interested in her.

And she was excited.

The things that would eventually become difficult to understand had not happened yet.

For now, there were simply two strangers on opposite sides of a screen, each imagining the person they might have found.

And neither of us yet knew how much those imaginings would matter.