He sent me a message that if it were coming from someone else or at a different time I might have deleted it. But he caught me in a good moment and I took his fairly straightforward, confident message as something that made me smile as opposed to roll my eyes.

He asked fairly soon if we could meet up for a coffee. I said I’ll think about it, tell me something about yourself first. And he mentioned a few things, we started talking about his big, chaotic family. He made me laugh, it was easy to message with him, he’s very attractive. When he asked again about meeting up for coffee I asked when he’s available (because he’d have the longer commute to get closer to me). And he said a week Wednesday.

It’s a date, I said. And we carried on messaging. He warned me that he’d be away visiting his parents for a few days but even when he was there he sent me messages. One of the messages said something like ‘you’ll see soon’ and I responded that I was looking forward to it.

I figured when it got closer to the Wednesday we’d iron out some of the details beyond a time, day and general location. Only at the time of writing, he has not been online in the place we were messaging in 6 days. And that Wednesday? It came and went with no word from him about it.

I don’t know if it counts as being stood up or not but it also doesn’t feel great.