Closure

When I want to say good-bye to someone, I say good-bye. If I’m through with someone, I say good-bye.

I don’t know that I’ve ever simply stopped speaking to someone.

This is true in the world of work, in the world of friends, in the world of dating, even on Tinder.

I don’t simply disappear. I don’t “unfriend” people without telling them I’m doing so, don’t “unmatch” them without a heads-up. (Once in my life, honestly, I un-friended a real former friend on Facebook without announcing that I was doing so, but honestly, our friendship was so attenuated at that point, he couldn’t possibly have seen it as a surprise.)

They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This is one way in which I’m insane. I am baffled – baffled, hurt, saddened – by every person in every social medium who simply disappears. This happened all the time in Tinder, which was kinda good. It gave me some practice at clicking with someone, connecting with her, and then having her disappear. I wrote about this before once. It happens more with the younger women, but it’s just endemic.

There’s an OKCupid question that gets at this – it’s something like, “If you decide you’re not interested in someone after two dates, do you tell them or not?”

This is one of my few mandatory OKC match questions.

Just sayin’.