Is It Me?

[joreth]

My point here, Alan, is that there IS a good way to breakup with someone, and it DOESN'T include a POST-IT!
~Carrie Bradshaw, Sex And The City

Phone Conversation:

Brian Smelt: (paraphrasing) I'm sorry, I have to cancel our 3-day vacation together that starts tomorrow.  My grandfather died and I'm leaving right now for St. Pete to be with the family.
Me:  Oh no!  I'm sorry, I know how much he meant to you.  Is there anything I can do?
Brian Smelt: (paraphrasing) No, I don't know how long I'll be there or when I'm coming back home, but I'll call you when I get there so you know I arrived safely
Me: Thank you.  I'm really sorry.  Call or text me anytime for any reason.  I'll be here if you need me.  And let me know when you know what the plan is so I can reschedule our trip.
Brian Smelt: (quoting) OK baby, I love you.  I miss you and I can't wait to see you again.  Goodbye.

***2 weeks pass***

Yes, you read that right, 14 fucking days go by without a single phone call, text message, IM, or email of any sort.  The last thing I heard from him was "I love you, I miss you, and I can't wait to see you again".  The only way I knew he wasn't hit by a bus on the way to St. Pete was because I saw his fucking login stamp on his OKC and his MySpace page several days later.

Normally I don't play the "he said, she said" game online.  I prefer not to drag my exes through the public mud in the sort of catfighting that happens in LJ.  But then again, most of the time my exes are decent people who just happen to not be compatible with me.  In this case, however, he deserves the rank of Online Skeezball for his asshatery.  And, once again, I have only myself to blame as I approached him online first.  We had not been dating very long at all, and the distance made our in-person dates only about a handful of times.  But he had already said he loved me and things seemed to be going perfectly.  He said all the right things and was exactly what I was hoping for.

Then, with no warning, he disappears.

After 2 weeks, I finally drive the 3 hours north to his house to wait for him and find out what happened.  Long story short, he gave me plausible, although unsatisfactory, excuses about his phone getting turned off, his satellite internet dish getting blown away in a storm, etc.  I'm pissed at him for disappearing, he's pissed at me for something I said online ... when he finally checked his email.  I left there with an answer, incomplete though it may have been, and a promise to contact me in 1-2 days with an answer about whether or not to continue the relationship and a promise to return my email if I haven't heard from him by then and I want to prod him to find out what's up. 

I gave him 4 days.  He never returned my email.  I sent him one final email telling him he's an asshole for not breaking up with me properly.

Seriously, do I have a sign over my head that says "Assholes Wanted, Apply Within" or something?

**EDIT**  This guy also made it very clear that he had no interest in a casual relationship and proclaimed many times he felt "seriously" about me.  He went to great lengths to assure me, even when I wasn't asking for it, that this was something long-term and "real".  I actually thought it was kinda early to be making those kinds of statements, but I felt that the things he claimed to want and the person he claimed to be were very much in alignment with what I wanted in a partner. 

His lack of contact was very out of character for the person I thought he was.  He habitually called and texted me several times a day, to the point that my phone bill was nearly 3x my usual amount that month.  He actually freaked out when it took me 2 hours to respond to a text from him once.  Regular and instant contact was the norm here ... until his little disappearing act.

When he did disappear, I did give him a few days before I started to freak out.  After all, I knew his grandfather had just died and things were likely chaotic.  But when I saw the login timestamp on his profiles several times and no responses to my emails at all, that was just unacceptable.  He had time to check his MySpace but not to email me with "sorry, things are fucked up, I'll call you in a couple of weeks"?  There was absolutely no one with a cell phone he could borrow to call me and say "quit emailing me, I'm breaking up with you"?

Comments

[zzita.livejournal.com]

i figured how to get the pic to work after i posted :).

i think u & i are a lot alike, in how we react to this behavior. not knowing, not communicating, drives me bonkers too :/.

my guy thinks he is doing so much better bec now when he 'hides' (he uses the same word as you, in a different context :) he texts me once a day. but his texts say things like, 'i'll call u tonight. really!'. and then he doesn't.

he does care about me a lot, but he is also very closed-off emotionally, which i find frustrating. i think that's not unrelated.

the disappearing always makes me think he doesn't want to be lovers anymore (last time i even put an ad on craigslist to replace him). and he just can't see why i think that, when he's told me it isn't true.

so, here u can see what it would have been like if u hadn't dumped his ass :/.

[joreth]

Yeah, glad I did. Although, technically, since he just never returned any of my messages, one might say he dumped me :-)

I had a boyfriend a couple of years ago who kept pulling the disappearing act, blaming it on being busy with school, but I never developed any strong emotional attachment to him, and he never claimed to love me. So it was just someone would ask me how he was doing, and I would realize that I hadn't actually talked to him in a couple of weeks.

That didn't hurt me like this one did, but I still ended up breaking up with him because, in every practical sense, we were *not* dating. I never saw him, I never talked to him, neither of us were a priority to each other, and we had no strong emotional attachment - any more than a friend. We just *weren't* dating, regardless of what we were calling it.

So I called him up and said "look, I like you and all, but we're not actually dating, so let's just call this relationship what it is. When you have time for me, give me a call and we'll try it again". He tried to get me to change my mind, but he never did attempt to make me more of a priority, so we remain casual friends who occasionally see each other at parties.