Nothing Has Happened Yet, but Your Mind Has Already Made the Movie

Early dating is wonderfully efficient at producing material from almost nothing.

A man takes a little longer to reply, seems slightly quieter than usual, or says something perfectly ordinary in a tone your imagination finds suspicious, and somewhere behind your forehead a small production company quietly opens for business.

At first, it is modest—just a movie preview.

Coming soon: He Loses Interest.

There is moody music, one unanswered message and perhaps a brief shot of you discovering, for reasons not yet established, that he has met someone else with a suspiciously photogenic life.

Nothing has happened, of course, but that has never stopped cinema.

The Preview Is Usually Better Funded Than the Evidence

Dating anxiety has a peculiar talent for taking one small unknown and giving it a complete storyline.

He has not replied since lunch, which at this point is the entire fact.

Unfortunately, facts are not always considered sufficiently entertaining, so the mind begins adding atmosphere. Perhaps he is pulling away, perhaps you said too much, or perhaps he has been slowly losing interest for days and you, poor innocent woman, have been eating pasta completely unaware.

By bedtime, the original silence has acquired motives, supporting characters and a rather sophisticated ending.

The film practically made itself.

What makes this especially funny is that nothing needs to be wrong for production to begin. Sometimes the man is lovely, things are going well, and he appears interested, attentive and suspiciously normal.

Excellent. Now we have something truly alarming.

Because if something feels unusually good, surely life is preparing a twist.

Soon the Studio Wants a Full Feature

One anxious thought is rarely satisfied remaining one anxious thought. It wants development.

Maybe he will disappear, and if he disappears, perhaps it means he was never serious; if he was never serious, perhaps everything he said was fake, and if everything was fake, perhaps you have once again demonstrated a catastrophic inability to recognize men who own secret trapdoors.

Quite a journey from a man who has been in a meeting since two.

The imagination is now casting extras. His hypothetical future girlfriend has appeared, your hypothetical heartbreak has wardrobe, and somebody has booked a restaurant for the scene in which you accidentally see them together six months from now.

The remarkable part is that the emotional response can become completely real even when the event is entirely fictional.

The movie is imaginary.

The miserable evening is not.

Then You Start Reviewing a Film That Hasn’t Opened

This is where early dating becomes particularly absurd, because you may begin reacting to something he has not actually done.

A perfectly pleasant message arrives, but you read it through the plot already forming in your head. A normal change in plans suddenly looks like foreshadowing, and a quiet evening becomes suspicious because Act Three apparently requires one.

Soon you are not simply dating the man; you are also dating his imaginary future behavior.

That is a crowded table.

Naturally, the imaginary version is capable of anything because he has no obligation to obey reality. He can cheat, disappear, lose interest, become cold, move to another state and develop an entirely new personality before breakfast.

Real men are limited by time and geography; imaginary men enjoy tremendous freedom.

Occasionally, However, the Film Is a Documentary

Now comes the important complication: sometimes the anxiety did not write the story.

Sometimes the man did.

If he is actually inconsistent, disappearing, misleading, cruel, secretive or forever leaving you with that unpleasant feeling that the floor has moved half an inch, then the footage exists and no special effects are required.

That is a different production entirely.

The distinction is almost comically simple when viewed from a distance: did something happen, or did your mind make something happen?

One has evidence.

The other has excellent cinematography.

And yet from inside early attraction, the two can feel remarkably similar because uncertainty itself is such fertile material. The mind dislikes blank spaces and will happily decorate them, usually with the least relaxing wallpaper available.

The Movie Usually Gets Worse Before Reality Arrives

If left alone long enough, the production becomes ambitious.

Now it is no longer He Might Lose Interest.

It is Why This Will Never Work.

A much larger release.

Previous disappointments may receive cameo appearances, old betrayals are brought back from retirement, and someone from 2017 who behaved terribly is apparently now consulting on the current relationship despite not having been invited.

The new man has done almost nothing.

Unfortunately, he has been cast in a whole series.

And this is perhaps the most exhausting part of dating anxiety: you can spend enormous emotional energy surviving events that never take place, with entire relationships ending in your head before the actual relationship has finished choosing appetizers.

Then the Lights Come On

Eventually reality has a rather rude habit of interrupting the screening.

The man texts. He was busy. The strange mood passes, the feared catastrophe fails to arrive, and the elaborate film you spent two evenings watching simply vanishes because apparently nobody bothered to shoot the ending.

Or reality confirms that something genuinely is off, in which case the story becomes much simpler because imagination is no longer required to supply the trouble.

Either way, the lights come on and suddenly you can see what was actually on the screen.

Sometimes dating anxiety is intuition noticing something real. Sometimes it is memory wearing a director’s hat. And sometimes nothing has happened at all, but your mind has already written the screenplay, hired the cast and scheduled the premiere.

The man, meanwhile, is still trying to decide what time to meet you on Saturday.