Hello all, sorry for the big wall of text but I’m having such a bad time and I need some form of closure. TL;DR at the end.
I’m a 37 year old male and I’m going through quite a shock. I moved to Spain around Christmas and since then I have been slowly building my life here.
I met a girl on Hinge and she seemed incredible to me: really pretty, with the same values as me, looking for something serious, and valuing “peace” (this will bite me in the ass later) above everything.
We started seeing each other every weekend and she showed me some places around. I thought I had found the woman of my dreams, with both the good and the bad included.
On the 5th date things started going deeper: we kissed. From there the communication deepened, we talked every day, sweet words, projections from both sides about the future. She told me things like I gave her security and treated her well, and that no one had treated her the way I did. She really liked that I was very “predictable”.
I also don’t want to blame only her. I was falling in love very deeply and maybe I came across as intense (anxious attachment maybe?) but I never pushed her, disrespected her, or became super persistent. I always tried to adapt to her rhythms and take care of her the best I could.
Some red flags I ignored: she pushed very heavily on the topic of my cats, as she has a phobia of them. At the beginning I told her “we will see when we get there”, but she kept pushing on later dates until I gave up and told her “If in the future we end up living together and a family project comes into the picture, I would evaluate a responsible rehoming for them”.
I’m really ashamed of this, as they are my family and a central part of my life and I love them deeply. That day, when I came back home, I cried a lot. But inside I was thinking this was the girl of my life, so I needed to keep exploring the bond and I would deal with this in the future, probably years away.
Then we kept seeing each other, with her telling me sometimes that I seemed anxious, trying to over optimize everything to make it perfect and avoid any problems, and that I shouldn’t worry, that she would tell me if something was wrong. That I should just enjoy the ride.
Besides that, they were some of the best weeks I had had in years. Telling her how fortunate I was to have found her, kissing very passionately every time we saw each other. She told me her parents liked me because I treated her well. I started bringing flowers to our dates, she gave me presents, and I was in heaven, super in love with her. We eventually became exclusive.
From there everything was normal. We passed the 2.5 month mark and then came the crash.
Last weekend I planned to spend the night at a hotel in her city. The day before, I was joking with her that in my original country usually you become “official” after two months of dating, trying to see how she felt about it, and she told me “that’s too fast, let’s wait and see what life brings us”. But besides that she was very sweet like usual.
Well, when I arrived in her city I realized I had bought the wrong return train ticket, so the only option was changing it to one at 7am the next day. I didn’t care, but she insisted that I take one at 21:00 the same day instead (so no sleepover) and she was pretty adamant about it.
Then I also realized I had accidentally made the hotel reservation for the wrong date, so I agreed. She told me that in the worst case I could sleep at her house after changing my ticket, and she told me she had planned breakfast together for the next morning.
I was pretty bummed and became more inside myself because of this. I also wasn’t feeling well physically.
We went to have lunch and she started bombarding me with what felt like an evaluation:
“you are going three steps ahead”
“we are too similar and I’m afraid we could amplify our anxiousness”
“stop giving me flowers so often” (so far only three times).
And I felt under heavy scrutiny. That made me even more withdrawn. I was also tired and feeling a little sick.
After that we went to have coffee and later, because I wasn’t feeling well, we spent the last couple of hours inside her car near a park. There I told her I felt she was quieter than normal and she said everything was okay. She told me she didn’t know how to help me, that she could help me look for a bus to go back earlier, etc.
Then she asked me if maybe I was depressed (?) and at the end we talked about how she had cut off all the men she met on apps. She is 30 years old and had only one relationship that lasted 9 years, from 16 to 25. After that she cut off every man she dated from Tinder.
But the whole thing felt very strange. I felt like I was being evaluated somehow.
She also didn’t want to kiss me that day “because I was sick and I could spread it to her” (which felt strange because the weekend before she was sick and we kissed normally many times).
My body felt something was wrong. We said goodbye at the train station with just a hug and when I arrived home I sent her a text:
“sorry for the low energy today but it was nice seeing you anyway. Next time will be like usual!”
And she replied:
“Rest well 😊”
Over the weekend I tried talking to her normally on WhatsApp but she was very contained and still in evaluation mode:
“How are you feeling?”
“If you weren’t sick what happened to you?”
“Did the Saturday plan overwhelm you?”
And I tried to explain that no, the plan was fine, that it was just a day where everything went wrong at once but I wasn’t making a huge deal out of it.
Then on Monday she was acting super dry so I sent her an audio message. Basically I explained that that day I wasn’t feeling like myself because I had really wanted to spend the night with her (we never had sex) and it felt like the perfect storm of bad things that made me act unlike my usual self. That she was very important to me and I didn’t want that to affect our relationship.
I didn’t blame her or beg her.
She replied by text thanking me for the explanation but telling me she was quite affected by what happened on Saturday and that she felt “the energy was left in a strange state” and that she needed one week for herself with no plans.
I told her no problem and here I am.
I honestly don’t understand exactly what I did that set her off so badly that day. Yes, I was low energy and a little more inside myself, but I didn’t yell at her or make a scene or anything like that. That day she was super cold and I felt extremely analyzed and under a microscope.
Since then we haven’t spoken and she hasn’t communicated with me. The change was so deep and so sudden that I felt abandoned in something that a normal couple would solve together.
I really love her, so this sent me into a spiral of sadness. I barely eat or work and I cry a lot. I just can’t understand what happened and I would really appreciate some external perspective on this.
I’m alone in this country and sadly she was all I had, so I’m devastated. I will probably send her a message next week but I feel it will only be for closure.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this and for your empathy.
TL;DR: I met a girl in Spain and we developed what felt like a deep, loving connection over 2.5 months. Everything seemed great until one weekend where I was low energy, sick, and a series of small logistical problems happened. She suddenly became very cold, analytical and distant, said the “energy felt strange”, and asked for one week of space. Since then she disappeared completely and I’m devastated and struggling to understand if I truly did something that bad or if she emotionally checked out much earlier than I realized.