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CarpeComa -> RE: Origins Of Real Vs Fake (12/10/2010 3:18:53 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DesFIP
I would think you set that situation up by pressuring someone you had never laid eyes on to move to you, sight unseen. If you had approached the situation more realistically, you would not have had such huge and overinvested expectations.
To avoid this in future, CC, I would suggest meeting for coffee, no pressure, no expectations of anything else, fairly early in the conversation. Mention to her that you will be in her area to visit family or vacation and you would love to meet for coffee. Expecting someone to move to be with someone who they might dislike in person or simply have no chemistry with is probably what caused her to flee. It's the equivalent of talking to a client on the phone, enjoying your repartee, and then having him propose marriage, all when you had never met. Does that sound reasonable to you? Nor to most people.
And this I see a great deal of online, people having wildly overinflated expectations who then cast blame about and call others fake. Instead of recognizing their own culpability in what transpired.
You are reading a *lot* that I didn't say into that post. As you were given only the sketchiest details of what happened, what basis do you have to infer that my expectations were "wildly overinflated"? Did I ever say she was 'fake'? Did I say I was flawless or perfect? Keep in mind that all this transpired and evolved steadily over a six month period.
I was being skimpy on the details because I didn't want to obfuscate my point. With the information I had at the time, I don't think my expectations were terribly out of line. I am still going to be light on some specifics because if she was telling the truth, to do otherwise would be a rather gross disregard for her privacy.
Early on, she had said that she was going to move once she graduated. She just hadn't decided where to yet. She had given some very good reasons as to why she didn't want to stay in that city and we both knew that the field she was finishing her education/training in was in fairly steady demand just about anywhere, so she was highly transplantable.
At the time I was marginally employed and not making enough to cover expenses. I could have scraped together the money for the trip, though it seemed rather fiscally irresponsible to do so (I took a similar trip a couple months ago and it was about $1,500). On her part, it would have been a lesser financial strain, but still non-trivial. I had pushed for her to come down for much the same reasons you mentioned. I probably offered to help with the expenses, but at this point I don't remember for sure.
As she was going to move anyway, after a couple of months I made a case for her to move to Dallas from a variety of reasons (not the least of which was that I was there). After talking about the idea for a bit, she asked to move straight in, but I had refused that for several reasons (what if there’s no chemistry, you or I could turn out to be complete psychos, people need time to acclimate to each other, etc). Instead, I found some apartments nearby that were in her price range.
By early December she already had a job and place lined up (or so she said) and we were discussing how she was going to get down here. At this point in time, my financial situation had improved to the point I was no longer running in the red, so among other things we were batting around the idea of me flying up and driving down with her (say what you want, but if you like each other a lot at a distance, you almost certainly can at least tolerate each other’s presence for three days).
During the whole time, if anyone was putting the brakes on ‘progress’ and moderating goals it was me. While the step was indeed a big one, she seemed very enthusiastic about the whole thing, though not to the point that she was glossing over the magnitude of what she was doing. So I was rather surprised when she dropped off the face of the earth. From my perspective it’s like driving a car with a strongly revving engine, pulling up to the starting line, and having the engine suddenly go dead. What made me mad wasn’t that she got cold feet (assuming that’s what happened), but that rather than saying anything she just ran off.
Did I do everything that was reasonably within my ability? No, I did about 90%-95% of it. In retrospect, were there some things that seemed just a bit too fortuitous? Yes, but I had no simple way of verifying them. Were some mistakes made and did I learn from them? Yes, for one; when a person of interest popped back up after a long absence a couple months ago I went and met her in another country, in under a week (however, my financial situation was a lot better than it was in December). If she was being honest with me, were my expectations ‘wildly overinflated’? I think not.
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