The Man Who Was Here on Thursday and Gone by Monday

One of the stranger talents in modern dating is the ability to disappear immediately after behaving like a man who has absolutely no intention of disappearing.

He does not usually spend Date Four staring sadly into the distance or slide a small farewell note across the table while mysterious music plays somewhere nearby. Quite the opposite: he orders another drink, asks what you are doing next weekend and tells you about a restaurant the two of you should try.

He kisses you goodnight. You go home thinking, Well, that was nice.

And then the man performs his greatest trick.

Gone.

By Monday, you are looking around as though somebody should at least explain where the trapdoor was.

The Vanishing Act Has Very Poor Timing

If a man disappeared after one terrible date, nobody would need a detective, a philosopher or three friends in a group chat. The evening was awful, he vanished afterward — fine. At least you know what happened. The real confusion begins when the dates were actually good.

You were not planning your wedding or choosing names for imaginary children. You simply had the extremely modest expectation that a man who had been happily seeing you might continue being a man who happily saw you.

Wildly ambitious, apparently.

Because disappearing after several dates has a peculiar little flourish to it. He has already become familiar enough to occupy a small corner of your week. You know which neighborhood he lives in. He knows you hate raisins. There is an unfinished conversation about a movie. He has mentioned his sister twice.

Then suddenly he is just… gone.

It is rather like watching a magician vanish halfway through making himself a sandwich.

You were not expecting a grand finale.

You were expecting lunch.

And because there was no obvious ending, the disappearance begins making everything that came before it look suspicious.

Was he pretending?

Did he know on Thursday that he would disappear on Monday?

Was the restaurant suggestion part of the act?

Good heavens, how much preparation went into this??

Suddenly the Previous Dates Are Put on Trial

A disappearing man can become far more mysterious after leaving than he ever was while sitting across from you. Four days earlier he was a perfectly ordinary man in one of his two blue shirts; now you are looking back at the lovely evening, the kiss goodbye and that restaurant he suggested for the following weekend as though one of them must have been trying to tell you something.

But Thursday may not have been hiding anything at all. He may genuinely have enjoyed the date, genuinely have liked you and then, somewhere between Thursday and Monday, changed his mind. Annoyingly, people can do that without slipping a secret message into dinner first.

And really, changing his mind is not the strangest part. The disappearing is. A grown man can decide not to date you anymore without being lowered through a hidden trapdoor beneath the restaurant. One sentence would have done nicely—nothing elaborate. Nobody was asking for a handwritten scroll.

A Man Can Leave Without Becoming a Mystery

The trouble with a disappearing act is that it makes you want to look backstage.

Surely something must be behind the curtain:  Another woman? An ex? Fear? Bad timing? A sudden calling to a monastery?

Who knows.

At some point, the theories start becoming more interesting than the man ever was.

Meanwhile, the actual man did something much less glamorous: he went on several dates, seemed interested and then disappeared.

That is annoying enough without giving him a cape.

From a few steps back, it is almost funny. On Thursday he was discussing Saturday over pasta; by Monday—poof. No smoke, no rabbit, just an empty seat where a perfectly ordinary man had been sitting.

You see, Thursday does not have to become counterfeit simply because Monday was rude. He may have genuinely enjoyed the dates, meant the restaurant suggestion and still handled his exit with all the grace of a man leaving through a kitchen window. One does not erase the other; it simply means the pleasant beginning ended rather badly.

And once you stop treating the disappearance like the final trick in a magic show, he becomes much less mysterious. He is simply a man who left without saying goodbye.

An empty stage can look intriguing for a little while, but eventually it is just an empty stage.