She replied the next morning with a photograph of a dog wearing a raincoat outside her sister's building. The caption said the dog was making better use of the weather than most adults, and I laughed while waiting for my coffee to brew. We exchanged a few messages over the next week, but neither of us treated the conversation as a test of how quickly a person responded. I had work, she had work, and the gaps in between didn't feel like warnings.
Our first dinner was at a small place that served pasta in bowls too large for the tables. Sarah arrived five minutes late after the train was delayed and apologized before I'd even stood up to greet her. I told her I was glad she'd made it and that five minutes didn't require an investigation. She smiled and said that was a relief, because she had planned to blame the entire transportation system if I looked disappointed.
We talked about family, childhood pets, travel disasters, and the places we'd lived. She mentioned a close circle of friends she'd known since her first job, and I felt a brief tightening in my stomach that embarrassed me. She noticed my expression and asked whether she'd said something strange. I told her no, only that I'd had a complicated experience with group dynamics in my last relationship.
Sarah put down her fork. "Do you want to tell me about it?"
I considered giving her a simplified version. I could have said my ex had been too attached to her friends, that I was happy to be free, and left it there. Instead, I told her that I'd spent a long time feeling like I came after everybody else, and that I was still learning how to describe what happened without making friendship itself the villain. I said I didn't expect her to be available constantly and I didn't want my experience to become a set of rules she had to obey.
"That sounds exhausting," she said, not looking for a joke. "For both people, probably, if the expectations never line up."
I nodded. "I think I waited too long to be honest about how bad it felt."
"Have you been honest about it now?" she asked.
"I think so," I said. "I'm trying to be."
She told me that she loved her friends and planned to keep loving them, but her idea of a friendship included being happy when someone got promoted, married, or too busy to attend dinner. She had missed a friend's birthday the previous year because her father needed help after a fall, and nobody had questioned where her loyalty lay. She also admitted she'd once canceled on a partner so often that the relationship suffered, and that learning to communicate had been uncomfortable but necessary. I appreciated that she didn't present herself as a person who had never made a mistake.