Am i delusional / How to move on without closure
Going anon because this is a little ridiculous lol.
I had a long-distance textuationship/situationship/relationship-thing with a guy for most of 2024 with it going really well, at least at first. He had moved to my hometown while I was away in college and we matched on a few of the apps while I was home for a break. We hit it off pretty instantly; he was funny, super smart, had a lot of similar interests as me, and was exactly my type. He had recently graduated and was working a job that required a lot of hours (think investment banking & law level of hours), but still managed to text me every day for a healthy amount of time.
We went on a date over another break when I was home after 3 or so months of texting and calling, and it was magical. We went to dinner, went around the city, spent the whole night talking, and I ended up sleeping over. We ended the date with a kiss, and I thought I had found the one. We continued to speak back and forth, he would make jokes about me being husband material, and I thought I was set.
Then, all of the sudden as I was coming home for the summer break, a switch flipped. He became more distant, claiming he was super busy with work (which is probably not untrue), and we didn't text meaningfully every day like we had before. There were days when it happened, but it was rarer than before. He traveled for a bit, continued to work, and I ended up seeing him once in passing which was a nothing-burger of an interaction, albeit at a weird setting (I was dropping something off at a building which happened to be his office and he came out to say hi).
After this, a few weeks passed with it being business as usual before he stopped responding to me. No explanation, no reasoning, nothing. I texted him as I had done the day before and was met instead by being left on read. I was crushed, the man who I had built in my head as being perfect decided that I wasn't the one for him and didn't even have the decency to tell me.
After this, I largely moved on with my life. I go through another year of school, land an internship in a big city, and move there for my last summer of college. One day, as I'm scrolling aimlessly through Hinge waiting for the subway, I see it. His profile, with the same photos as when I had first met him a year and a half prior. I decide "what the hell" and send a like, not really expecting a response (which indeed never came), but I knew he was still single.
Fast forward to now, I'm about to graduate and it's looking like I'll be moving back to that same city as I was last summer. It's a large city with a big gay community, but there are still only so many gay people and the likelihood that we see each other somewhere is far greater than 0%. I have no desire of stupidly getting my hopes up and trying to "set myself up" with him again, but I just can't shake from my mind how good it was especially when we were together, or how closely it seemed like our desires from a relationship aligned. Would I be delusional/insane for sending him a text or something especially since I'll be in the same city, and/or if you also had a situation where you had to move on without closure, what did you do?
Posted Feb 23, 2026, 5:57 AM UTC