Being romantically involved with someone you have never met

Why do people keep excusing why they haven't met?

Among the people here, the excusing tends to come from both sides at once, and that is what keeps it going. On the other person's side, the reasons given are usually real-sounding and hard to check from a distance: circumstances that make closeness unsafe or impossible right now, with the promise attached that it is only for now.

On the teller's side, people here held back from pressing because pressing felt cruel given what the other person was going through, and because they did not want to be the one who forced an answer they might not survive hearing. What several of them noticed only afterward is that the withdrawal did not come when the obstacle was at its worst, but when it started to lift and meeting became genuinely possible.

Ember’s view. The reasons are not really the question, which is why examining them never settles anything. What the people here were actually protecting, by accepting reason after reason, was the connection itself, because testing it directly meant risking the one place where they felt wanted. The ones who stayed stuck longest were not the ones who believed the wrong explanation, but the ones who kept asking whether the explanation was true instead of noticing how long they had been asking.

If you want to know, you can name one concrete thing with a date attached and let what happens to that date be your answer, rather than the reason you are given for it; the people here who never did this paid in months and years, and in money they could not spare.

What signs of avoidance did people miss at first?

The thing people here missed was not a warning sign hidden in the other person's words but the plain absence of a step toward real closeness, which was there from early on and stayed there. Looking back, several of them could see that the warmth and the promises kept arriving on schedule while the concrete move toward meeting or hearing each other's voice kept not arriving, and that this was true for months or years, not weeks.

What made it hard to see was that the withdrawal was never a refusal; it came as an obstacle, a bad stretch, something the other person was going through, each one plausible on its own and each one explainable by real difficulty in their life. For more than one of them the pattern only became visible as a rhythm rather than an event: closeness rising, then distance, then return with renewed tenderness, with nothing further along than before.

Ember’s view. The sign people here look for is a tell in what was said, and there almost never was one, because the words were consistently good. What these lives actually show is that avoidance was never visible in any single moment and only ever visible in the shape of the whole thing, which means the question of what you missed is less useful than the question of what has actually changed between the first month and now.

You could name one concrete step toward meeting or hearing a voice, give it a date, and let what happens on that date count as the answer rather than waiting for another explanation to be either true or false. For the people here who never set that date, the cost was months or years of the same rhythm, and, for some, money and health they could not spare.

What made people finally doubt the connection was real?

For the people here, doubt did not arrive as a revelation; it arrived when the obstacle to meeting stopped changing shape and started repeating. Several of them had gone a long time, months into years, with daily or near-daily contact and a steady supply of reasons why a call or a meeting was not possible yet, and what finally unsettled them was noticing that every reason was one they had to take on the other person's word.

The sharper turn came for some of them when the practical barrier actually lifted and the closeness did not follow, or when something central about the other person's life turned out to have been kept from them.

Even then, doubt and leaving were not the same thing: people here kept engaging, kept giving, kept trying to find the words to raise it, and mostly stayed, because the warmth in the messages was real to them even while the facts were not settled.

Ember’s view. What these people show is that the doubt was never going to be resolved by more evidence from the other side, because the other side controlled all of it. The question that looks like "is this real" is, for the people who stood here, closer to "how long am I willing to fund the not-knowing" — and some of them could not name what proof would ever be enough, which was itself the answer.

If you want something firmer than circling, ask for one concrete thing with a date attached and let the date pass without helping it along; the people here who did not do this kept the connection and kept the turmoil, and the ones who moved toward that clarity found it cost them the hope they had been living on.