Picture this: You’re on a Tinder date that’s going surprisingly well. The conversation flows like good wine, you’re both laughing at the same terrible jokes, and for once, someone actually looks like their profile photos. You’re thinking maybe the dating gods have finally smiled upon you.
Then she drops the L-bomb.
Not like a casual “I’m loving this pasta” or “I love how you think.” No, I’m talking about the full nuclear option: “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
We’d been sitting across from each other for exactly two hours and forty-seven minutes. I know because I’d been obsessively checking my phone, the way you do on first dates when you’re calculating whether this person might murder you or marry you.
The restaurant was one of those dimly lit places that make everyone look like a movie star and every conversation feel like it holds the secrets of the universe. She’d been tracing the rim of her wine glass with her finger, a move so cinematic I wondered if she’d practised it.
“I know it sounds insane,” she continued, leaning forward like she was about to share state secrets. “But I’ve never connected with someone like this. Can’t you feel it? This electricity between us?”
Here’s the thing: I could feel something. The conversation had been effortless in that rare way that makes you forget you’re essentially strangers deciding whether to share bodily fluids. We finished each other’s sentences, laughed at the same obscure references, and had the same irrational fear of butterflies.
But love? After we’d just spent ten minutes debating whether pineapple belongs on pizza?
Every functioning brain cell I possessed was sending up flares like a sinking ship. But her conviction was like a drug. The way she looked at me, like I was the final piece of a puzzle she’d been trying to solve her entire life, made me want to believe that maybe, just maybe, this was how love stories began.
So I swallowed the red flags along with my tiramisu and decided to believe in fairy tales.
The next three weeks felt like being trapped inside a rom-com directed by someone on speed. She texted me good morning paragraphs that belonged in poetry journals. She showed up at my apartment with coffee and croissants because she “was in the neighbourhood” (she lived forty minutes away). She talked about weekend getaways we’d take, Netflix shows we’d binge, and how I’d fit perfectly into her friend group.
The plant was her masterstroke. A small succulent she bought for my apartment during week two, presented with the line: “Something that’ll grow with us.” I put it on my kitchen counter next to my sad collection of takeout menus, and for a moment, my bachelor pad looked almost… hopeful.
My friends tried to stage interventions disguised as casual hangouts.
“Dude, this is moving fast, even for you,” my roommate said after she’d spent four consecutive nights at our place.
“You don’t understand,” I told him, the way people in cults talk about their enlightened leaders. “This is different. This is real.”
Famous last words, right?
The crash came without warning, like Netflix cancelling your favourite show mid-season. One Tuesday morning, sandwiched between a spam email about extending my car warranty and a dental appointment reminder, her breakup text appeared:
“I think I moved too fast. I need space to figure things out. You’re amazing, but I need to focus on myself right now.”
The plant died exactly fourteen days later. Not from neglect, I’d been obsessively watering it, desperate to keep something from our relationship alive. I killed it with attention, the same way she’d killed us with intensity.
Here’s what I learned while staring at that dead succulent: She probably wasn’t lying when she said she loved me. In that dimly lit restaurant, sharing tiramisu and trading life stories, she likely felt something she genuinely interpreted as love. But her love was like a sparkler on the Fourth of July, brilliant, captivating, and designed to burn out fast.
The real gut punch wasn’t that she left. It was spending months afterwards playing detective with my memories, wondering if I’d imagined the connection, if I’d somehow failed to live up to the person she thought she’d fallen in love with over dessert.
I discovered later that what I’d experienced had a name: love bombing. Not always the calculated manipulation you read about in psychology articles, but sometimes just someone who feels everything at maximum volume, who mistakes the adrenaline rush of new attraction for the steady burn of lasting love.
Now, when someone tells me they love me before we’ve even argued about whose turn it is to take out the trash, I remember that dead plant on my kitchen counter. Real love doesn’t need to announce itself with fireworks on the first date. It whispers instead of shouting, builds instead of exploding, and knows that the best stories are worth taking time to tell properly.
Some people fall in love fast and hard. Others, like me, learned to fall slowly and stay longer.
Check out:
The Singlehood Series: My Family Pressured Me To Date And Get Married To A Toxic Man
The Singlehood Series: She Showed Up To Our Date With A Hangover
The Singlehood Series: He Arranged For A First Date Outside Our City Without Checking With Me First
The Singlehood Series: He Insisted That I Should Meet His Parents On The First Date
