Ex appearing in dating app matches

[balletomane]

My ex broke up with me in summer and I've had zero contact with him for two months. He wanted to try and return to the friendship we had pre-relationship (he broke up with me), and I wanted that too, but after trying it for a while I realized it was just too painful and I was going to need some time without contact to heal. He was understanding.

 

A few weeks ago I decided to give OLD a try, as this last experience has seriously put me off dating within my friendship circle. I've been on one date so far and it went really well. We're meeting again soon. I was feeling pretty hopeful and positive about things.

 

Now my ex has just appeared in my matches on the app. I'd deliberately set my age range on the app to exclude his age, but on there he appears as five years younger than he actually is. Suddenly seeing his face when I didn't expect it was more unsettling than I thought it would be, especially as it tells me he's back in town now (he's been traveling) and this leaves me worried that I'll run into him at social events. Our social circles overlap and we have shared interests. There's an event I was/am planning to go to next weekend that he'll almost certainly be interested in.

 

I feel like this unintentional contact has set me back. It's made me feel how much I miss him all over again. I miss him as a friend rather than a partner (I actually agree with him that it wasn't working out for us, even though I really wanted it to), but this doesn't make it any easier. I can't be the first person to experience this. I guess I'm just wondering how other people have handled it.

[d0nnivain]

Healing from a break up can be two steps forward one step back. It happens.

 

Block him on the app. Focus on the negative that he lied on the app. Who wants to date a liar?

 

Do some self soothing & carry on.

[balletomane]

I've blocked him. I doubt he set out to lie. That wouldn't be his style. I think it's more likely that he signed up for the app with Facebook, which then imported his details. Like a lot of people he didn't register with Facebook his actual birthday, and I don't think your birthday can be changed after the fact.

 

I don't want to be with someone who is as emotionally unavailable and uncommunicative as he is. For all his good qualities, he failed to communicate well and he hurt me in ways that were avoidable. I keep reminding myself of this.

[balletomane]

Something about the incorrect age info has been getting to me. Even if he signed up with Facebook, that doesn't explain why he didn't give his correct age in his bio, as I've seen a couple of users do. Then I realized what was making me so uncomfortable: he has a history of being with younger women. He's ten years older than me, which I don't think is a problem at our age. But I've seen photos of his girlfriend before me (we have half a dozen mutual friends on Facebook, and I've seen her in some of their pictures) and she looks very young. I decided to see if her age is public. It is. She was 24 when she was with him. That's a 17-year gap. I checked the age of another of his exes. An 11-year gap.

 

Before we became a couple, he used to say that I was one of his two closest friends. The other is also a woman. I checked her age. She's in her mid-twenties, fifteen years younger than him.

 

Everyone in his relationships was a consenting adult. Fine. But I'm disturbed by the fact that he seems specifically drawn to younger women, both romantically and platonically...and that I didn't register it. I don't think he's predatory. I think it's more that women his own age tend to be established in their lives and know what they want, while he's still vacillating between options and on an emotional level is still a twenty-something figuring his life out. But it really bothers me that I didn't pick up on this sooner. Looking back there were always signs of emotional unavailability, fears of intimacy and commitment, a tendency to change his mind rapidly, but I just didn't put two and two together and make four.

 

This is a wake-up call. I need to be much more selective with future partners. At least it's cured me of missing him. This was not what I needed in my life.

[S2B]

When you see his profile hit the “block this user” on his profile.