On being with someone who doesn’t want to be with you

WARNING: NSFW. GRAPHIC SEXUAL LANGUAGE. NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT IDENTITY. I met Adelaide in early January. We’d both swiped left on Tinder and after discovering our mutual love of dogs, camping and card games, we decided to meet up. I challenged her to a game on Uno and a drink and she eagerly accepted my challenge. We met a couple of days later in a small bar in the city. I was running late and was very flustered when I arrived. I seated myself in front of her, apologising profusely for my lateness. Adelaide was beautiful. Really beautiful. She had short, side-shaved ginger hair and eyes also the colour of ginger. She was boi-ish and wore men’s and boys’ clothes but there was something incredibly feminine about her facial features. Adelaide was shorter than me, which I hadn’t expected. Being only 163cm tall, I’ve always been the shortest of my friends and I hadn’t dated a woman shorter than me. Despite her shortness, Adelaide had a very strong presence and I was truly captivated by her. We talked, and laughed and drank. We drank an awful lot. Adelaide mentioned early on in the evening that she had had a look at my instagram page (I’d put my instagram details on my Tinder page) and that she’d recognised a girl who’d featured in my pictures a month or so ago as the girl her ex was currently dating. So, our exes were dating. Vic and I had broken up at the start of December after 3 or 4 months and Adelaide and her ex Ashley had broken up at the end of October after 3 years together. This may have been a deal-breaker for straight people, but the lesbian dating pool isn’t as large as the breeder dating pool, even in the sprawling metropolis that is Sydney. I got over my initial horror and we drank more. We got chatting with the Irish couple sitting next to us and decided to play charades together. I’ve never laughed so much in my life. Adelaide was hilarious and full of life and so beautiful. At around 1am, we were kicked out of the bar as it was closing. We snuck our drinks out and sat by the harbour. ‘I guess you’re probably not over your ex, seeing as you only broke up recently?’ I asked. Adelaide agreed that she wasn’t and that she’d joined Tinder because her friends were all telling her to move on and she thought she should put herself out there. She said she hadn’t expected to have such a great time with me. I told Adelaide I was completely over Vic either. Adelaide suggested that what we probably both needed was a good shagging, so we caught a taxi back to her place. I hadn’t done any lady-maintenance and was slightly self-conscious about it, this dissipated pretty fast when Adelaide and I disrobed and started kissing. Touching Adelaide felt amazing. Her skin was soft. Her breasts were soft and round and she smelled and tasted delicious.  I can’t usually reach orgasm with someone new, but I had no problem with Adelaide. We both reached climax several times before falling into a sated, sweaty heap. When I left the next morning, I kissed Adelaide goodbye and wished her well with moving on from her ex. I certainly didn’t think I’d see her again. Adelaide texted me a couple of times during the day saying how much she’d enjoyed the evening with me. She suggested we get together again the following evening, but I dug my heels in and told her I’d already made plans. A couple of days later, after more flirty texts, I caved. I went over to hers and we had another night of ridiculously good sex. Adelaide and I responded so well to each other’s bodies. We had similar kissing styles and we enjoyed the same things sexually, we both preferred tribbing to scissoring and were generally really compatible sexually. More than anything, I was insanely sexually attracted to her and her to me. Adelaide and I had sex with the lights on and would maintain eye contact while we orgasmed (often climaxing together). I found the eye contact a little much at the start but I grew to crave it and it certainly made our sex more intimate and intense. The next weekend, Adelaide was housesitting and it was the Australia Day public holiday weekend. I spent most of that weekend with her. Adelaide and I listened to music, ate delicious food and had plenty of sex. During the weekend, Adelaide told me she was getting all she needed sexually and emotionally by hanging out with me, that she was thinking about deleting Tinder. She told me she only ever went on Tinder to look at my profile. I told her I was feeling the same. All I could think about was Adelaide. I didn’t want to get involved with Adelaide seeing she wasn’t over her ex. My friends warned me that it would end in tears. I unconvincingly told them I was keeping my distance from her. The fantastic sex made it hard to keep my feelings for Adelaide in check and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I would actually jump from my chair in excitement whenever I received a text from her. I was kidding myself that I’d be able to maintain a casual relationship with her. I deleted my Tinder account. A few days later, Adelaide asked me why she could no longer see me on Tinder, had I blocked her? I reminded her of the conversation we’d had where she said she was going to delete her Tinder account. She looked surprised but said she would delete hers too in that case. It must have been the following weekend that I was at her place. She’d invited me over to her BBQ and games night with her housemates and a few friends. I don’t eat meat, and Adelaide had gone to the effort of providing me with a yummy vegerian option. We played Cards Against Humanity which was so much fun. Adelaide sat next to me and put her hand on me knee. She kissed me in front of her friends. Suddenly I realised we were breaching the line between friends with benefits and something more complicated. That night, Adelaide asked me what the hell we were doing. ‘It was just supposed to be sex, that’s all. But we’re getting involved on an emotional level too and you know it’. I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t want to admit that I was developing feelings for her, that I loved being enclosed in her arms, I loved her raw feistiness, her sense of humour, I was beginning to enjoy the intimacy of our sex and the way it made me feel connected to her more than anything else. Then she told me she was falling for me. It felt so good to hear these words, but I couldn’t say them back to her. I had only known her for a couple of weeks and although it had been very intense, I couldn’t help but feel scared by this admission. I felt like I was being pulled into something very destructive that could only end in heartbreak and I no longer had control of my emotions. A few days later when I saw Adelaide, I told her that I felt the same way, that I was falling for her too. When I said the words, I felt like I was betraying my sense of self-preservation. I had put it all out on the line and I was so vulnerable now to being hurt. Adelaide and I talked about how we could make it work. We decided we’d date exclusively but soon after, she mentioned to me that she was still using a couple of dating apps ‘just to make friends’, including Tinder. I started to lose faith in Adelaide. I told her I felt like a fucking idiot because I had deleted my Tinder account in response to her saying she was going to delete it. I didn’t trust her. I told her this. Adelaide responded by deleting the dating apps. She told me she had inadvertently hurt me whilst she was trying to protect herself. She said she didn’t want to lose me and that she wanted to find a way to make us work. Adelaide made a big effort for a short while. We both seemed unable to avoid wanting to put a label on what we had and it was putting immense pressure on our relationship. After a few days, Adelaide told me she wasn’t ready for a relationship. She said she thought her ex had been the love of her life at the time and that they would be together forever but that the realisation that this was not the case changed how she felt about relationships and about love. I think she really struggled with the fact that Ashley managed to couple-up a few mere weeks after breaking up with Adelaide while Adelaide was still nursing a broken heart. I was lying in Adelaide’s bed when I told her I thought it was best to both walk away from what we had. I couldn’t help breaking into sobs as I said this. Adelaide said she didn’t want to lose me and folded me in her arms. I felt so safe in her arms and I succumbed and agreed to give it another shot. The next evening, I was lying on my bed, thinking about the advice my sister and my friends had given me. Adelaide was just out of a there year relationship, she wasn’t ready for anything. She wouldn’t wake up one morning and suddenly decide she was ready. Then she called me. My initial thought was that she was calling to end it but her voice sounded light and cheery. ‘I’m ready to make this into a proper relationship. I really want to give this a go. I want to be with you.’ She said. I was ecstatic, but I only told a couple of friends. I knew in my heart that Adelaide could change her mind at any given time. The passed three weeks had been a roller coaster of emotion and I didn’t feel secure. Surely enough, over the next week, Adelaide started to withdraw from me. I no longer received the good morning and good night messages she would religiously send me at the beginning. I also received fewer texts during the day and they no longer finished with several emojis and multiple kisses. Adelaide was losing interest and it was nothing short of devastating to me. The sex was different too. It was less intimate and more robotic. We were going through the motions, but I no longer felt connected to her in the same way. Adelaide felt like a stranger. One morning, I woke up early, reached over and found that Adelaide had already risen. I found her outside, soaking up the sun and sucking down on a cigarette, hot tea in hand. She didn’t look happy or relaxed. I tolerated the distance for a couple of days and then I called her and told her I was coming over to hers to talk through some stuff. Adelaide looked miserable when I arrived. She didn’t greet me with a hug, she didn’t even get up from her study chair. I went and sat on the veranda and waited for her to join me. A few minutes later, she came out and told me she knew it was going to be a bad day when she woke up this morning. I fought back the momentary guilt I felt at possibly making her day worse. ‘I know you’re struggling with feelings of not being ready to be in a relationship. I can deal with that. I can do exclusive dating, I can do taking it slowly, but what I cannot and will not do is put up with all of this up and down crap all the uncertainty and now the distance and withdrawal. We need to break up’. I’d put it out there and was surprised at how well I’d managed to say it and without crying or allowing her to be the decision maker, the one who said the words of finality; ‘It’s over’. Adelaide agreed that she had been feeling distant and that, although there were times of feeling like it was the right thing to be in a relationship with me, there were also the feelings of regret and panic. I told Adelaide I deserved to be with someone who was as excited about being with me as I was about being with them. She agreed and said that had I not visited her this evening to talk, she would have ‘called me in a day or two’. During our talk, Adelaide mentioned that she had no recollection of telling me she was going to go off Tinder. She said that it could have happened but that she was so drunk and couldn’t recall it. She said she was having doubts as to whether or not the conversation actually happened because she knew at the time that she wanted to keep her options open. That was the decider for me. Was Adelaide that far removed from the relationship that she could break up with me over the phone and after telling me she loved me? Could she really believe I would make up a conversation like that? Or was she just a total bitch and I refused to see it? I left her place that evening with a thought in mind. I might visit my friend in Melbourne. I’ll send Adelaide a post card from my destination. ‘Wish you were here’. On the back, with a thick black marker I’ll write ‘…NOT!’