Hey! I know sometimes I give a lot of detail and background and it seems hard for me to get to the point, but I'm having trouble communicating with someone who I was in touch with a lot just a month ago and I don't know how to talk about it with her without ruining it.
It's me from the posts last year about the woman I met on Plenty of Fish, who's four years older and doesn't drive but lives an hour and a half away. We had two great dates, one in late December and another in early January, and kept in touch until mid-February pretty regularly. We held hands a bit in a park after eating at a pizzeria on the second, and she kissed me on the cheek at the end, not as much intimacy as I'd hoped for, but she claimed in texts later to have fantasized about much more from the beginning, later sexting both verbally and visually (though never exposing genitalia). She lives with her parents and claims they're more prudish than her and she's nervous about making noise, but also claimed she brought her claimed only prior and last boyfriend back (maybe he lived locally or had his own place, neither of which is possible for me since I live with my mother with no hope to pay for rent or utilities any time soon). We communicated a lot about all sorts of mundane topics too, of course, right up through late February when I was dumped on the call floor at my job with minimal practice in what at first was training from 1-9:30 a grueling five-day week.
Some things aren't adding up, though, and now that I'm just 11-6 5 days a week, I feel like what I was looking forward to is gone. The week before Valentine's Day, when I asked for an address to send flowers (I had to pick her up both times so I know the apartment building, just not the number), she said my presence (a very difficult thing to deliver when every single weekend had miserable weather) was enough, making me think she saw this as more of a "friends with very speculative benefits" situation, something I didn't mind, and still entertained the thought of a car makeout session or even perhaps sneaking around while her parents weren't there, basically living the teenage love life I missed out on as a now 30-year-old relationship virgin, as soon I felt I could safely and smoothly make it over for an afternoon or even a night.
The month-long five-days-a-week job training and my new schedule with Saturday work (Sunday's my only weekend off, Wednesday now too for appointments) stressed me out and made communication harder, but I tried. However, after the 19th, when we tried to find each other for text, neither of us texted each other for three days, then I texted her the night of the 22nd asking if anything had changed, got nothing but a reply to a text the next day like nothing had happened. Engaged with her in texting my last traditional weekend off the 23rd-24th, a bit the next couple days, but then didn't hear from her the week up to this past Wednesday when I texted her again. The texts are more chaste now, I have to drive the conversation more, and it's been almost two weeks since she last started the conversation unprompted, though I don't know if I should have initiated more. Maybe I didn't communicate enough those late nights after work, but I felt my nerves stripped raw every single time and sort of hid hoping to get through another day of unpredictable weather, work expectations, and my Mom's roller-coaster experience as a substitute teacher that has crumbled after the district just kicked her out. I had a lot on my plate, and I don't know if she felt neglected, but she's more active on Facebook than with me and I fear the worst. I don't know how to engage her on it without seeming abusive or possessive, or whether she lost interest or I did, but I don't want to lose her or have this keep recurring. I think I can finally say I've been in a short relationship and not feel completely insecure dating again, but I hope her response if I press her doesn't make me feel like it was all in my head or hers.
16 Mar 2019, 10:01 pm
