The Guy Who Never Ghosted Me

I’ve been friends with Dan for nearly twenty years. In all those years, he has never once gotten laid.

This is, on the face of it, a puzzle. It is not for lack of social skill: I don’t know anyone with more friends than Dan; the man collects people the way some people collect watches. He had two girlfriends in high school and college, so we cannot quite file him under incel.1 He is short but he has compensated by being voluble and pathologically unselfconscious in any room. (He once asked out a Miss World title holder without hesitation and spent the afternoon showing her around Boston; he proudly managed to extract a kiss on the cheek.)

Nor is it for lack of willing participants. He has turned down several women I considered decently attractive, and my standards are high. “Not hot enough,” he explained. “And she’s a little bit… fat.”

“Dan,” I said, with the special despair one reserves for friends who cannot see themselves clearly, “she’s cute. Plus — you know you’re a bit overweight too, right?”

I have been thinking about Dan this week because of a different friendship — one that went the other way. I met someone at a TimeLeft dinner two years ago. We hit it off, took a four-day theme park trip, traded the best Queens food trucks back and forth. I set him up with a standup comedy producer and attended his first ever show. I offered to help revamp his Hinge profile for free last June, which he didn’t respond to. Then I messaged him last July: nothing. I hearted a story of his in December: nothing. In April I texted to ask how he was doing, and got the kind of silence that is unmistakably an answer.

I know friendships have seasons, and not everything gold is meant to stay. After hundreds of dates in NYC that went nowhere, I got good at telling myself: just not a match. Not everything is a referendum on your worth. Sometimes two people are simply on diverging paths and no one has to be the villain. But it still hurts. Sitting with that absence, I kept circling back to its opposite — to the person who never left.

I thought about Dan. About the sheer, dogged, slightly insane consistency of him.

Once, I flew down to visit him in San Diego, where he was living at the time. He offered to pick me up from the airport, as he always does. After I landed, every call went to voicemail. I stood at the curb with my bags, working through the possibilities — a car accident, or else my abandonment fears finally coming true on schedule. Then he pulled up, over an hour late, muttering “I’m a wi-fi man, I’m a wi-fi man” by way of explanation as he took my bags. Up until that point, I hadn’t known that Dan keeps no cell plan, on principle, having decided a person should be able to move through the world on public wifi alone. This despite being, at the time, the CTO of a tech company.2 He had spent the whole hour inching through a traffic jam, unreachable, driving toward me because that had been the plan. He had always been coming for me; he just had no way to say so.

He has been one of the few who stayed — through my breakups, my ill-advised business schemes, my creative crises, my long medicated stretches of being no fun at all. I disagree with him about politics. I have, more than once, wanted to set him on fire. And still he keeps showing up. This has been tested. When I broke up with my longtime boyfriend in 2015, I fell apart, and Dan was not there: he had quit a graduate degree and moved continents to chase a woman who was plainly using him to chase her own ambitions. Baffled and feeling abandoned, I stopped speaking to him for nearly two years. For two years, I was the one who went quiet. Dan just didn’t accept it. He never does. He goes through this cycle with most of his female friends — he infuriates them in some inventive way, they exile him, and then, with the patient cheer of a Labrador, he wears them back down. After I moved to New York, he wore me down too.

There’s a saying that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. The dogged optimism that powers Dan’s friendships is the same engine that drives his romantic life. In a mutual friendship, it is touching. In an unrequited romance, it is deranged.

The animating project of Dan’s life is finding love; it is the thing his other decisions are arranged around like cardboard scenery. It led him to leave an Ivy League graduate program to co-found a startup with his romantic Moby Dick: a woman named HanBing, precisely his type, high-maintenance and pedigreed and difficult. To Dan, difficult was a feature. “Why would I want to manage the Holiday Inn,” he once said, “when I could manage the Four Seasons?” The startup had pitch decks and disruptive aspirations, but in actuality, it was a VC-funded talking phase to the tune of millions. He believed that through the alchemy of spreadsheets and investor meetings, HanBing would be transmuted into his wife.

He didn’t think of romance, the way many of us do, as a series of narrowing funnels — date, kiss, exclusivity, proposal. He skipped to the end. He once brought his family’s heirloom ring to a sendoff dinner and proposed, having never kissed her. You have to admire the efficiency, if not the judgment. (For the record, she said she “might” marry him. Someday.3)

When I suggested his quest might benefit from, say, brushing his teeth, he reminded me — as he always does — that he is an avid user of mouthwash. HanBing herself had told him directly. The critique hadn’t changed anything; if anything it had calcified. I have tried to bully him into better hygiene many times. If you know me, you know I am conflict-avoidant and the opposite of controlling; Dan is my one shining exception. Once I spent two hours arguing with him through the streets of Tokyo, running every angle I had for why he might brush the teeth he had not, by his own account, brushed since his teens. By the end I was near tears. Crying, in Tokyo, a city I had saved for and dreamed about, over another adult’s molars. He was unmoved — more than unmoved. I could tell he was enjoying it, that he got a deep, private pleasure from the act of resistance, the way it can feel good to relax one muscle at a time in meditation. He was sinking deeper into himself. “I don’t think it would really make a difference,” he kept saying. “And someone should like me for me.”

I can’t entirely blame him, because I have told myself the same kind of lie. A few years ago, I did the unhinged thing of surveying twelve men I’d dated: a formal questionnaire, like an exit interview for a company nobody wanted to work at. Four of them, unprompted, complained about my chain vaping. After the first guy mentioned it, I thought: it wasn’t ideal, sure, but someone who really liked me would like me anyway, and the men who flinched were surely just dressing up I’m not that into you. But after the fourth mention, I decided to take it seriously and quit. Quitting was partly responsible for ending nearly a decade of endless first dates and two-month situationships. The men, it turned out, had not been lying.

My self-deception was also a failure of empathy. I didn’t understand that vaping actually bothered people that much! But the bigger issue I fixed was fundamental: I surveyed two men who said I didn’t seem very into them, and I realized that my mental model of how dating worked was broken. I had ingested so much dating advice to “play hard to get” and “men are hunters” and that “men just care about looks” that I didn’t understand men actually noticed and cared deeply if their date seemed emotionally invested. I had to update my mental model to emphasize how both sides needed to invest.

Like a lot of things with dating, it boiled down to something obvious: I had to pick people that I liked, and they also had to like me.

But we all encounter people we want who don’t want us back. The difference is that Dan has devised a brilliant workaround.

Dan likes to tell me about his Top 10 — ten women he maintains close friendships with that he wishes he could date. (I am not on it. He would tell me if I were.) It is a real list. It is ranked. The rankings move, and he will tell you when they move. He flies across continents to have dinner with them. He brings them small things from his travels: trinkets from Azerbaijan, spice blends from Peru, chocolates from Eastern Europe. They tell him about their romantic lives over long meals. He is invited to their weddings; he cried at one and did not, afterward, remove her from the list. He has asked several of them out. They have all said the same thing — not like that, but you matter to me as a friend. My boyfriends have sometimes felt threatened by male friends of mine. Never by Dan. They understood, without being told, that he posed no threat to the romantic order.

It is a kind of fantasy harem — a parallel love life conducted entirely in the key of friendship. I have come to think of Dan as pararomantic: he gets the intimacy of relating with none of the exposure of being perceived and found wanting. Far from failing at romance, he has quietly distilled the parts of it he can actually tolerate. He gets infinite “dates” with whomever he likes, because most women will agree to friendship. Sex appears to be beside the point — he says the best night of his life was sharing a bed with HanBing, both of them fully clothed. He told me this with his voice trembling, the way other men’s voices tremble recounting the birth of a child.

Change tends to arrive at a tipping point, when the cost of staying the same finally outweighs the cost of moving. Once I understood this, I felt an anticipatory heartbreak to realize that Dan would never reach it. He cannot hold a negative feeling long enough for the pile to build; he seems genetically incapable of staying unhappy. Whatever small frustrations his love life produces are outweighed, every time, by the chaste pleasures of pursuit: the crushes without need of reciprocation, the long intimate dinners, the world kept permanently full of romantic possibility.

Which means stuck was always the wrong word for him. Dan is not failing to change. He is getting exactly what he wants. To give up the harem — the forever-questing after a One True Love who, by now, has a child with someone else (although as he frequently reminds me, is not married) would not be a relief to him. It would be a loss. He is forty-two. At this big age, the LARP is not the mistake. It is the design.

And the design, I have been slow to understand, is also the reason he is the one still here, and not the TimeLeft man, or any of the (many) others who went quiet. The same refusal that ran the doomed HanBing campaign is the refusal that would not let my two years of silence stand.

A lot of social media chatter these days is about cutting people out of your life and protecting your boundaries, but I’ve come to realize that Dan’s best parts are wrapped up in his worst parts. If Dan were less obstinate — less certain of his own immovable rightness — he might actually make changes and inch towards achieving his dreams. He might brush his teeth. He might get a phone plan. He might, finally, get laid. However, he might not still be calling me twenty years on, wearing me down, refusing to hate me, even after I tried to ghost him.

Read on for more how this concept can be applied to fix your dating life:

• The family-systems concept that explains why every friend group has a Dan — and what their dysfunction does for you

• Why “what do you want in a partner” is the wrong question, and the one I think actually predicts whether you’ll stay

• The trait-and-tax problem: every quality that pulls you in is also billing you. Fix it and you usually kill what you came for.

• Why I kept dating men who refused to eat food— and what the selection effect was really running

• The vape audit: how I was using my worst habit to pre-screen dates without realizing it — and what yours is probably doing