Never Enough

When I met my Ex, I was a 38-year old heterosexual man, who never had been in a committed love relationship before. To keep a long story short, I avoided dating for most of my life, because I had a fear of rejection and a fear of negative evaluation. I had made some tentative dating attempts during my adult life, but as they didn’t come to fruition, I decided to focus on my career instead. At some point I had reached my career goals, settled down and felt quite confident in life. The COVID-19 pandemic deprived me of other things that once had brought joy to my life, thus I decided to try dating again, but this time for real.

My Ex and I started texting on an online dating platform and exchanged some friendly texts over the course of a couple of weeks. Our chat was polite, but we didn’t really establish a meaningful connection yet. During this time, she still has been in her home country in the Mediterranean Arab world, but planned on moving soon to pursue her career. She already set her location in the dating app to Germany, which is where I live. A few weeks after she arrived, I asked her out on a date.

She agreed first, but then canceled on short notice, because she had a tough week. As I would learn later, she was stressed from a breakup at that time. I decided to give up, but then she followed up and asked me out in return. Her place was two and a half hours away from mine, but I finally had a date after years, so why not give it a try. I put on nice clothes, some eau de toilette, and went on a long train ride to go on a walk with her. People say, you should avoid talking about politics, religion or money in polite company. During our first date, we had deep talks about politics and religion, which made an impression on me. After our walk, we sat down for a coffee, put off our jackets, and I thought: she’s not just smart, she’s also really attractive. We exchanged phone numbers and have been in contact since then every day until our breakup five months later.