I want to state this plainly because I still find it kind of incredible: in the four months we were in contact, he never once sent two messages in a row without a response from me in between.

Not once.

Not the casual "also —" follow-up. Not the link he thought of after. Not the "never mind, forget I asked." Nothing. He would send a message and then he would wait, and if I didn't respond, the next time I heard from him it would be a day or two later, a new conversation entirely, with no reference to the unanswered one.

The first time I noticed this I thought it was polite. The second time I thought it was intentional. By the fifth time I was losing my mind a little bit.

I would see a message from him and feel this thing happen in my chest — a slight quickening, which I am not happy to report. I would sometimes not respond right away on purpose, testing whether he would follow up. He never did. And somehow the fact that he never did made me more likely to respond quickly. If that's manipulation, it was the most hands-off manipulation I've ever experienced, and I refuse to believe he was doing it consciously.

Or maybe I don't refuse. I actually don't know.

The logic I kept coming back to: if someone doesn't chase, it's either because they're not interested or because they're confident enough not to need to. And everything else about the way he showed up — when he was there, he was actually there — suggested it wasn't indifference. Which only left the other option.

I talked to my friend about this and she said "that's just a boundary" and I said I know, yes, logically, but it didn't feel like a boundary, it felt like a strategy, and she said maybe it can be both and I wanted to argue but I couldn't.

Here's what it actually did to me, which I find slightly embarrassing to admit:

It made every conversation feel like an event. When you know someone isn't going to follow up, each exchange has this contained quality — it's complete in itself. There's no sprawl. No trail of half-thoughts sent at midnight because someone picked up their phone. Just: a thing was said, and you responded, and that was real, and then there was silence.

I found myself rereading conversations more than I should. Looking for what he meant. Looking for gaps between what was said and what wasn't.

The problem — and this is the thing I couldn't solve — was that the restraint, whatever its source, also made it very hard to know how he felt. I was getting information about behavior, not interior states. He showed up consistently. He engaged when we were together. He did not double text. What I couldn't tell was whether the no-double-text was distance or discipline.

I still don't know. We ended things — or it ended, I should say, because again, no dramatic final message, just a gap that got longer and then permanent — and I genuinely cannot tell you whether I was more attracted to him or more confused by him.

Maybe those were the same thing.

I'm seeing someone else now and he double texts constantly and it is both deeply reassuring and slightly less interesting and I'm not drawing any conclusions from that.