OctoberTrainHome

It was casual, clear and still mattered

I’m 42 and I’ve just finished five months of seeing someone without either of us wanting it to become a relationship. That sentence usually gets treated as the beginning of a disaster, so I wanted to write down one time when it wasn’t. We met in May. He was working near me on a temporary contract and returning to Glasgow in October. I had come out of a long relationship in January and did not want to plan another future with anybody. He did not want long distance and I did not want him to reconsider. We agreed that we were dating other people, although in practice neither of us did much. We normally met once a week. We did not meet families. We did meet a few friends because hiding would have felt stranger than just saying, “This is the person I’m seeing.” About six weeks in, we checked whether the arrangement still worked. Then we checked again in August because I noticed I was starting to dread October. I did not secretly want him to stay. I wanted time to stop passing, which is not quite the same thing. He left on Monday. We cooked at mine on Sunday, gave back the small collection of things we had accumulated and talked about whether we should stay friends. We decided not yet. Maybe later, after enough time that friendship would not be a way of continuing the same relationship by text. I cried after he left. I have also not messaged him asking whether we made a mistake. The ending hurts, but it does not make the five months dishonest or unhealthy. We wanted the same thing, kept asking whether we still wanted it and stopped when the arrangement reached the end we had known about from the beginning. I think I am posting because “casual” sometimes gets used to mean careless. This was not careless. It was limited. There is a difference.