notes_app_relationship

I thought I wanted casual. Turns out I just didn't want to rush this one.

I’m 31, she’s 34, and this is the first time I’ve been on this side of one of these situations. We met last summer, about four months after I’d ended a relationship where we had lived together for six years. I was very clear that I did not want another relationship. Not “not yet” in a coy way. I genuinely wanted to date, have sex, go home to my own flat and not be accountable to anyone’s calendar for a while. She said that suited her. For maybe five months it genuinely did. We saw each other once or twice a week. We both dated other people at first. There were no arguments about labels because neither of us wanted one. I actually remember thinking this was the healthiest dating experience I’d ever had because nobody was secretly auditioning the other person for a role. Then things changed so gradually that I didn’t notice until she did. We stopped dating other people without discussing it. I started leaving things at hers. She met my brother because he happened to be at the pub, then somehow six weeks later she was invited to his birthday. We booked a festival for this summer. If I had a bad day, she became the person I wanted to tell. In February she asked if we were still casual. I said yes far too quickly. She didn’t argue. She just said, “Okay, I don’t think I am anymore.” That scared the life out of me, partly because I thought the next sentence was going to be that I had to become her girlfriend immediately. It wasn’t. She said she didn’t need an answer that night, but she did need to know whether I was still actively choosing casual or whether I was just repeating the agreement we’d made eight months earlier. I was annoyed with her for about two days, which in hindsight was mostly because it was an annoyingly good question. I asked for a month. She agreed, but said she wasn’t willing to carry on indefinitely while I worked it out. We still saw each other, but less. We didn’t have sex for a few weeks because she said it was making it harder for her to think clearly. I hated that, but I understood it. The useful part of the month was realising that I kept answering the wrong question. Every time I thought “relationship”, my brain jumped straight to our lives becoming the life I had just escaped: shared rent, shared laundry, every Saturday automatically together, eventually marriage because that’s what adults supposedly do. But she hadn’t asked for any of that. So we had a very unromantic conversation in a Wetherspoons with the Notes app open and actually said what being together would mean to each of us. Exclusive, yes. Girlfriends, yes. Meeting friends and family without pretending we were just mates, yes. Making plans together, yes. Living together, no. Marriage, neither of us knows. Children, neither of us wants them. Still having nights and weekends that are completely our own, definitely. It turned out I wasn’t resisting most of what she wanted. I was resisting a whole imaginary relationship package she hadn’t offered me. We’ve been officially together for four months now. Nothing dramatic happened when we put a name on it. I still live alone. She still disappears hiking with her friends for whole weekends. I still sometimes get a flash of panic when plans start filling up too far ahead, and now I actually say that instead of pretending I’ve suddenly become very busy. I’m not posting this as a “they’ll come round eventually” story because I could easily have spent that month and realised I genuinely only wanted casual. She knew that too. I think the difference was that she gave me room to answer, but not unlimited room to avoid answering. And I finally stopped treating “I’m not ready for a relationship” as if the word relationship had one universal definition.