Close-Up Dog

You have no distance setting. When you like someone you are all the way in inside a week: the long messages, the plans for next year, the thing you noticed about them that nobody else noticed. It is not a strategy and it is not fake. Half the good things in your life exist because you moved toward somebody faster than the situation strictly allowed.

The other half of the time you overrun people. You mistake intensity for intimacy — the sheer volume of what you are giving convinces you the relationship is further along than it is — and when they step back you experience it as rejection, when it was pacing. Afterwards you replay the whole thing hunting for the sentence that did it, which is a habit that always finds a culprit whether or not one exists. None of that replay is information. It just costs you the evening.

Do not turn it down. Split it up. Give a new person about half of what you want to give and hold the rest for six weeks. The people who are going to match you will close the gap themselves in that time, and you will get to watch it happen, which is the one thing you have never let yourself find out.