wednesdays_are_different

We tried being friends straight away. That was the bit that actually broke me.

I’m 38, he’s 41. We were seeing each other for about a year and a half, although for most of that time neither of us knew what word to use for it. We met through mutual friends and started sleeping together fairly quickly. He’d come out of a long relationship the year before and said from the start that he wasn’t looking for another one. I said I was fine with that. At the beginning I genuinely was. By six months, I wasn’t. Nothing dramatic changed. We just became important to each other. I had a key to his flat because I fed his dog when he travelled. He knew my sister. We went away twice. We had a standing Wednesday dinner that somehow became sacred. Neither of us was dating anyone else, although we’d never actually agreed not to. I told him I wanted us to be together properly. He said he loved what we had but still didn’t want a relationship. I asked whether that meant not now or not with me. He said he honestly didn’t know. That answer kept me there for another nine months. I’m not blaming him for all of that. He never promised me a date when he’d magically become ready. I was the one who kept translating “I don’t know” into “probably, if I’m patient”. He also kept choosing all the closeness we had, so I don’t think I invented the grey zone on my own either. Eventually I ended it. There wasn’t a huge fight. I just realised I’d started measuring every good week by whether it meant he was getting closer to choosing me, and that was making me miserable. Here’s the part I got badly wrong: we decided to stay friends immediately. It sounded mature. We had mutual friends. We genuinely liked each other. Neither of us wanted the other person erased from our life just because the romantic bit hadn’t worked. So we stopped having sex but changed almost nothing else. We still texted every day. Still did Wednesday dinner. He still called when work was awful. I still had the dog key. Once, about three weeks after we “ended”, he fell asleep with his head on my lap while we watched TV and I sat completely still for an hour because moving him felt like admitting something had changed. I told myself friendship was proof I was handling it well. Then he went on a date. He told me beforehand because he didn’t want me hearing it from someone else. I said all the correct things and then went home and was furious with him for doing something he was completely entitled to do. That was when I finally understood that I wasn’t his friend yet. I was his ex-whatever waiting in the same seat with sex removed. I asked for three months with no contact. He was upset and initially said it felt unnecessary because we hadn’t had a bad breakup. I nearly backed down because I didn’t want to punish him. Eventually I managed to explain that it wasn’t punishment. I just couldn’t find out what friendship with him felt like while I was still hoping every nice evening meant we might restart. We actually went nearly five months without speaking apart from one practical message about something I’d left at his. That was last year. We are friends now, which I didn’t expect. Not best friends. Not daily-message friends. We see each other with the wider group, occasionally have a drink on our own, and I no longer know his weekly schedule. The first time he mentioned the man he’s now seeing, I felt a small sting and then it passed. That was very different from the physical drop in my stomach the year before. I’m dating someone too. It’s early, so who knows. I suppose I used to think a clean break was only necessary if somebody had behaved terribly. Nothing terrible happened here. He wasn’t ready for the relationship I wanted, I stayed longer than was good for me, and then we both tried to skip straight over the part where the relationship had actually ended. The distance was what made a real friendship possible. Trying to be friends immediately was just another way for me not to lose him yet.