I met a man two years ago through a mutual friend. We became good friends very quickly and, because of the circumstances at the time, spent most of that summer seeing each other as friends almost every day.
I was in the middle of a very dark period of my life, with a huge amount of change and emotional upheaval. I freely acknowledge that it was probably the worst period of my life. I was about as far away from the real me as I could possibly have been when he met me.
At the end of the summer, I returned to where I lived and slowly had to start rebuilding my life.
He was there.
Every day.
Phone calls. WhatsApp messages.
He was always very practically minded. He never let me wallow in the emotion of it all. He would call to see whether I had showered. Over time, as I rebuilt, he helped me find the tools I needed to rebuild my life rather than trying to do it for me.
I had been through things that left me with significant trauma and a profound loss of trust. I had stopped trusting almost everyone. He knew the full extent of what had happened and had been one of the very few people I allowed close to me.
I am a highly expressive and emotional person. I feel my way through life using emotions and language. I think in long form. I analyse everything.
I am also, I think, highly emotionally intelligent. I am very attuned to my own emotions and to the emotions of other people. I can usually see what is happening underneath a conversation, and I tend to want to talk about it.
He is almost the opposite.
He is pragmatic, grounded and emotionally contained. He tends to look at a problem and ask what can be done about it. I tend to want to understand what it means, why it happened and what is happening underneath it.
He also struggles with my emotionality. He frequently criticises the way I feel things or the intensity with which I express them. He has told me that he hates feeling responsible for other people's feelings.
I have tried to explain to him that there is a difference between being responsible for somebody else's feelings and being responsible for the impact of our behaviour on someone we are in an intimate relationship with.
We do not get to behave however we like and then say that someone else's feelings are entirely their own problem.
He has been married twice. From what he has told me, both marriages involved him being emotionally distant and unavailable in ways he now recognises. He has described himself as someone who has historically struggled with emotional intimacy.
I have wondered whether he has an avoidant attachment style, although I am very aware that people are far too fond of diagnosing everyone as avoidant simply because they don't behave in the way we want them to.
What makes him difficult to understand is that he is not generally distant from me.
In fact, the opposite is true.
He is extraordinarily present in my life. He talks to me constantly. He is often the first and last person I speak to in a day. He will spend hours talking to me. He has been there through some of the most difficult things I have ever experienced.
So I don't think the simple explanation is that he is an emotionally unavailable man who doesn't want intimacy.
He seems to want an enormous amount of intimacy with me.
The difficulty appears to be that he is much more comfortable with intimacy when it remains within certain boundaries that he controls.
He can be deeply emotionally connected to me through conversation. He can be intensely sexually intimate with me remotely. He can be incredibly present and involved in my daily life.
But real-life romantic intimacy seems to activate something different in him.
That is the contradiction I cannot resolve.
We became extremely close, although after that summer our friendship was conducted almost entirely over the phone and WhatsApp.
The few short relationships I tried during that period all had one undercurrent of a problem: the man I was seeing would eventually feel threatened by my friendship with him.
Not because they were insecure men, necessarily. But because of how heavily I lean on my friend and how present he is and was in my day-to-day life.
One of these short relationships was with a man who lived overseas. I would fly to see him regularly. But my friend was the person I would text:
Let me know you've landed.
I've landed safely.
I'm in an Uber now.
I recognise that this is probably backwards.
Anyway, fast forward to the start of this year.
I was finally in a better place. Not fixed or healed, but definitely further forward.
There has always been a level of chemistry and attraction between us, but it had never been acted upon.
Earlier this year, however, he started to drive our relationship in that direction.
I followed.
In trust.
We ended up becoming very sexually intimate remotely, through phone calls, WhatsApp and video calls. Every day. Our level of contact grew even more. I did the maths once. We averaged around 300 messages a day.
Every day.
Plus phone calls.
Plus video calls.
Plus the sexual intimacy.
I had known him for two years by this point. I trusted him more than I trusted almost anyone. I had allowed myself to become emotionally and sexually intimate with the person who had been the safest and most constant person in my life.
And, inevitably, I fell in love with him.
Naturally, I asked him what we now were.
We were both scared of losing the friendship. It was agreed that we weren't friends with benefits. It was agreed that we weren't just friends.
For all intents and purposes, we were in a relationship.
But he struggled immensely with that title.
I was at a work event once and met a man there. We got on very well. He asked for my number and asked whether I was single.
I honestly didn't know what to say.
So I told my friend that night what had happened.
There is something else that is important to understand about this relationship: there is an extraordinary amount of honesty between us. Probably more from me. He is much more guarded, although he has opened up considerably over time.
He has more insight into my day-to-day life than I have into his.
Anyway, I asked him:
Am I single?
Eventually, he said no.
But it was a very begrudging no.
It did not come easily to him.
Seeing each other in person, however, has been a struggle.
I wanted to desperately. But he always had multiple reasons why we couldn't.
To be clear, we live around two hours apart. One motorway separates us. We both drive. He keeps an apartment in London for work purposes. I live in London.
He does have a demanding job. He is a single parent. He has complicated circumstances involving his parents' health and a dog. But he co-parents well with his son's mother and, while his logistics are undoubtedly complicated, I would not say they are more complicated than those of an average 53-year-old man with a demanding life.
For context, he has never had a fling or a one-night stand. He has only ever been with a relatively small number of women, all in serious, long-term relationships.
He struggles deeply with emotional intimacy.
So we coasted along for a while, but inevitably I started asking why he wouldn't see me.
I had been immensely vulnerable with him sexually, digitally, but I was increasingly scared that I was simply a digital plaything.
I had never agreed to that.
I repeatedly told him that I would not have entered into the sexual side of our relationship if I believed it was going to remain purely digital. I was very clear that, for me, it was heading towards a relationship that existed in real life.
He repeatedly reassured me that I wasn't a digital plaything.
He told me that he wanted to translate what we had into real life.
But we have met once.
In all this time, we have met once: one afternoon at his flat in London, where he was still working.
We had lunch.
We did not have sex.
It was incredibly confusing for me.
We made a plan to meet the following week.
He cancelled.
We made another plan for the week after.
He cancelled that too.
I have repeatedly tried to ask him, calmly and directly, what he actually wants.
I have not demanded declarations of undying love or issued ultimatums. I have tried to ask for clarity in what I believe are kind and healthy ways.
But whenever I ask for clarity, he becomes defensive and shuts down. I end up frustrated, and then the conversation becomes about my frustration rather than the question I originally asked.
I have also tried giving him space, hoping that if I stopped asking and allowed him room, he would come towards me himself with some clarity.
That doesn't work either.
I have told him explicitly that I do not do well living in confusion. I have told him that if he is not able to be in a relationship with me, I would rather know.
I have given him repeated opportunities, with dignity and without drama, to walk away.
I have said, in essence: if this is not what you want, you can tell me. I will be hurt, but I would rather have the truth than continue living in ambiguity.
He has always stayed.
He has told me he will never leave me.
But I have also told him that, now that our friendship has crossed into what it is, I will never be able to return to simply being friends.
I love him too deeply.
The contradiction is that he tells me he cannot commit, but also tells me that I am not single and that he will never leave me.
He tells me he wasn't ready for a relationship, but that I came along and changed things for him.
He tells me he cannot give me a relationship, but does not want to lose me.
He wants the emotional and sexual intimacy of what we have, but becomes defensive when I ask what it actually means.
He is, in many ways, a walking contradiction.
And I have reached the point where I don't know whether I am being compassionate towards somebody who is genuinely frightened and emotionally limited, or whether I am allowing somebody to keep me in a situation that is profoundly painful because I love him.
This is not, in my view, a love-language issue.
If he were a man I had met on Bumble and this were the beginning of our relationship, I would be running a mile in the other direction.
I would probably be warning every other woman I knew to stay away.
The difficulty is that he is not a man I met on Bumble.
He is the man who was there when I was at the lowest point in my life.
He is the man who helped me rebuild.
He is the person I have spoken to every day for two years.
He is the person I trusted enough to become vulnerable with.
He is also the person who now seems unable or unwilling to give me clarity about the relationship he helped create.
On his most recent cancellation of our plans, I asked him to propose another day.
He point-blank refused.
I found this incredibly difficult. My position was that, in my experience, when you cancel plans with someone, you apologise and propose an alternative if you actually want to see them.
He did not.
When I explained why I found that hurtful and confusing, he called me controlling.
That was a significant moment for me.
I do not believe that asking somebody who has cancelled plans to suggest another day is controlling.
I believe it is a normal expectation of somebody who wants to maintain a relationship.
I am now in a period of no contact with him because I simply could not tolerate the ambiguity and the repeated disrespect of my time any longer.
I love him deeply. On many levels.
And if I am brutally honest, I wonder whether the intensity of my attachment to him is partly a consequence of the role he played in helping me survive and rebuild.
He was there when I was at my lowest.
He became the person I trusted most.
He became part of my daily life and my emotional world.
That makes walking away extraordinarily difficult.
Leaving him and walking away from everything we have would cause me significant emotional damage.
Given everything I have already been through, that is not a prospect I am taking lightly.
But I also cannot see a way forward.
And I am now beginning to wonder whether he ever actually intended to make this relationship physical.
Perhaps he genuinely meant it whenever he said he wanted to.
Perhaps he believed he would eventually be able to do it.
Perhaps he loves me in whatever way he is capable of loving somebody.
But perhaps, in practical terms, he has created a relationship that gives him almost everything he wants while allowing him to avoid the one thing I need.
A relationship that exists in reality.
So what exactly is happening here?
Am I looking at a man who genuinely loves me but is terrified of real-life intimacy?
Am I looking at a man who has created a relationship that gives him all the emotional and sexual intimacy he wants without requiring him to take the risks of a real relationship?
Am I being manipulated, even if he does not consciously intend to manipulate me?
Or am I somehow both right?
And perhaps the most difficult question is this:
If somebody genuinely loves you, but is unable or unwilling to give you the relationship you need, does the reason ultimately matter?
I am waking up every day now, and my overriding feeling is that I feel used. And defective. I feel like I am not good enough for him to want in real life and I was only ever good enough for some digital fun. But what an elaborate route to get there for him....