Did You Scare Him Away or Did He Just Run?

A man can be perfectly happy dating you until one day he becomes distant, and within about forty minutes you are wondering what on earth you did.

Was I too interested?

Maybe you texted back too quickly; maybe you mentioned seeing him next weekend or maybe, in a moment of complete recklessness, you told him you had a lovely time.

Good heavens.

No wonder the man fled.

Soon you are replaying the last few dates with the concentration of a wildlife tracker trying to work out what frightened a small animal back into the woods.

Was it the question about Friday, or did you laugh too enthusiastically at something he said? You did send two texts that afternoon—not together, obviously; there were seventeen minutes between them—but still. One has to consider everything.

And before long, a perfectly ordinary question—Why did he pull away?—has become something much more personal:

What did I do to scare him?

Please Make No Sudden Movements

Once you decide you may have frightened him, every normal sign of interest starts looking dangerous.

You liked him, which suddenly begins to look almost recklessly enthusiastic. You wanted to see him again, and apparently that may have required more restraint. Then, after several months of dating, you actually asked where things were going.

Well, now you are practically crashing through the forest banging pots together.

The whole thing becomes very delicate. You begin imagining that if you had only been a little calmer, a little harder to read, a little less obviously pleased to see him, he might still be standing nearby.

Easy now.

Do not reach for your phone.

Do not mention next weekend.

And whatever you do, do not say relationship. He may bolt.

The strange part is how quickly you can begin rewriting yourself around a man who has already pulled away. Suddenly you are wondering whether you should have waited another hour to answer his text, acted less excited when he made plans or pretended you had forgotten his name entirely.

Maybe that would have relaxed him.

Oh, Daniel? Yes. I believe we met once near a sandwich.

Much better.

Nothing terrifies a man like discovering the woman he has been dating remembers who he is.

The Tracking Becomes Quite Elaborate

Of course, blaming yourself has one very attractive feature: it gives you something to fix.

If the problem was the second text, excellent. No more second texts.

If you scared him by asking what he wanted, you can simply stop asking men what they want.

If being warm made him pull away, maybe next time you can greet a man you adore with the emotional enthusiasm of someone accepting a package she does not remember ordering.

Problem solved.

Before long, this is no longer about one text or one dinner. You are starting to change little pieces of yourself so the next man will have absolutely nothing to be frightened of.

And strangely, this can feel almost comforting. If you caused it, wonderful—you have something to fix. The alternatives are much more annoying.

Maybe he lost interest, or maybe he liked you but simply did not want the same thing. He may even be one of those men who enjoys closeness beautifully right up until closeness starts requiring him to actually be close. Or perhaps nothing mysterious happened at all: a grown man made his own decision and wandered off.

Very inconvenient.

That leaves you with no tiny behavior to correct, no text to rewrite and no convenient moment at dinner where you can point and say, There! That was when I frightened him. So you keep tracking instead, examining the last conversation and returning to one innocent comment from Thursday evening to turn it slightly in the light.

Could that have done it?

Meanwhile, the man himself is getting farther and farther into the woods while you are still standing beside a perfectly harmless text asking whether he wants tacos on Saturday.

At Some Point You Notice He Is a Grown Man

Eventually, if you stop studying the footprints long enough to look up, the whole scene becomes rather funny.

Here you are lowering your voice, making no sudden movements and wondering whether expressing ordinary affection frightened away a man who owns a phone, drives a car and presumably manages to enter grocery stores without assistance.

Maybe you did come on too strongly. People sometimes do. Maybe you wanted things to move faster than he did. That happens.

But that is not quite the same as believing every man who leaves must have been startled into doing it.

Sometimes you did not scare him away.

Sometimes he simply went.

And once that thought enters the picture, the forest gets much quieter.

You can stop crawling backward through every conversation looking for the branch you stepped on, and maybe stop planning a cooler, smaller, mysteriously unavailable version of yourself for the next man.

You can simply look at the situation from a little farther away.

You liked him, you showed it, and he pulled back.

And for weeks you have been standing at the edge of the woods wondering whether saying I had a wonderful time was too much excitement for one grown man.

After all that tracking, you may finally notice the strangest part: he wandered off, and somehow you were the one who ended up apologizing to the forest.