No Sex In This City: Distance makes the delusion grow deeper

In the last two weeks of the 2024 spring semester, I asked out this guy who I had thought was cute for a while. From now on, this guy will be called Roddy. We had a great first date that lasted from noon to the depths of the night. We agreed that we’d have fun and see what happened but not to rush anything, considering that there were only two weeks of school left.

The rest of our time together was spent taking walks, lying in bed chatting, watching TV, and, of course, making out. A week after our first date, I finally decided I was ready to do the devil’s tango — sex — for the first time ever. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, the tango was not deviled. Roddy was sweet about it, though, and for the last week of finals, we continued to see each other.

We kept in touch during the beginning of summer, but sometime in late May, the responses got scarce. Then, in June, I was the only one putting in any effort to carry the conversation. We’d send the occasional photo, but at the beginning of my semester abroad, we officially stopped talking for three months.

Come my winter break, I visited campus and he asked if he could see me. When we met up again for the first time in eight months, we talked exactly like we did back in the day and we sat side by side with his arm wrapped around me.

After Roddy hinted that we should continue our fling upon arrival back in Claremont, I became skeptical, thinking of a popular saying that I’m sure everyone has heard at least once in their life: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

It was inevitable that Roddy and I would see each other back on campus — after all, our extracurriculars and friend groups were the same. Had my heart grown fonder? 

Last weekend, I spent a whopping 10 hours stuck in a car with him and a few other people. Leading up to the trip, I thought about the what-ifs: What if being together makes that old spark rekindle? What if we get a moment alone and I tell him how I’ve been feeling about him for the past two weeks that we’ve been back on campus? What if this trip is finally my breaking point?

During the trip, Roddy was impatient, rude and overall in a pissy mood. He refused to compromise on where to eat, was passive-aggressive about when we had to leave and only thought about himself. Attempting to rekindle the flame of the spring, Roddy’s change of behavior made me feel the exact same way I felt when he first started going cold on me.

By the end of my extremely long three-day weekend, I was infuriated. I wanted nothing to do with anyone I sat in that car with, especially Roddy. All I could think of now was how excited I was to go back to my dorm and sleep my anger away.

I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but the following Tuesday when I saw him sitting alone in the Smith Campus Center lounge, my heart skipped a beat. Without thinking, I went to sit with him. Barely a day later and my aversion to being around him completely disappeared. How could that be? How is it that one day I want to strangle him to death but the next I want to go for a walk and act like old times? As I stared deeply into his eyes, I wondered: Does absence make the heart grow fonder, or does absence make the heart grow delusional?

The 10 consecutive hours he and I spent together forced me to see how Roddy truly was, or at least could be. My delusion had shielded me from Roddy’s inconsiderate, impatient and self-centered behaviors. Yet in the one day we spent apart, nostalgia crept in and I started rewriting the story in my head. I let myself remember how he held me while we slept, how we’d laugh together, how we’d talk for hours.

It was easy to forget why I was angry with him in the first place.

I waited months to be close to Roddy again, but now I realize that closeness was the problem all along. At the end of the day, Roddy isn’t just bad at texting, he’s bad at communicating. Absence never made the heart grow fonder, it made me forget why we stopped talking in the first place.

Tom Cat is a cat who owns a summer home in New Mouse City. Roddy lives on loser island, and is now dead to me. Meow meow meow.