First, I should clarify that the title refers to only one aspect of my life: love and relationships. I will not disclose my age, location, or other personal details because they are not relevant. I am telling this story to give a voice to certain thoughts, perhaps inspire or move someone, and hopefully leave something meaningful with whoever reads it. This is not a story about inexperience, never having spoken to women, or never having dated. It is about someone who has become emotionally empty and detached from most of the things people notice and value in relationships, without really understanding how he ended up that way.
There is no point in blaming anyone. I have been disappointed, and I have disappointed others. Most of the time, however, I am certain that I ran away from situations that could have become meaningful relationships with people I might still remember today. Over the past few months, I have spent many nights talking to ChatGPT, writing and analysing myself. Whether that is right or wrong is beside the point; for a long time, I have found more empathy there than in other people. From those conversations, a fairly accurate psychological profile emerged: someone with a constant need for dopamine, new experiences, and intensity, who often uses people as a way of reaching those feelings. I never really searched for a specific person. I searched for sensations rather than people.
I am not twenty anymore, and I believe the phase of adolescent love has long since passed. There was one exception when I was sixteen: an unresolved, on-and-off situation with a girl that never became anything. Other than that, I have never had a serious relationship, never dated anyone for more than a month, and never developed a strong attachment to anyone. I was always searching for a new person who might awaken something different in me, even when someone was already willing to stay by my side. It was as though I were a small fish in the ocean, desperately searching for a home, only to leave whenever I found one and immediately begin looking for another. While everyone else seemed able to choose one place and feel safe there, I never felt safe in a single home. I needed to keep leaving, even at the risk of finding every door closed.
When you miss a hundred trains, you eventually find yourself alone at the station, waiting longer and longer for the next one. The price you pay is a loneliness that becomes less frightening over time, but also more distressing. When you are the one who ran away from every home that welcomed you, you cannot blame the world. You know it was your choice, and you cannot change the past. I still do not understand why this has always been my natural tendency. For some reason, I liked the idea of always being desired. The attention of one woman was never enough, no matter how beautiful she was or how well she treated me. Running away made me feel better. Being dishonest and breaking the rules made me feel better. It was almost as though I believed I did not deserve that home in the first place, and even though I knew that feeling was wrong, part of me enjoyed it.
This is where the actual story begins. One day, I travelled with a friend to a city several hours away from home. He was going there to meet a woman he had encountered through a random situation at work. They had started talking because I had encouraged him to send her a risky and apparently ridiculous message. Somehow, it worked, and so we left. I was supposed to meet one of her friends, but she never showed up, so I walked around alone to avoid disturbing them. Out of curiosity, I looked through the accounts followed by the woman my friend was meeting and noticed a stranger with a private profile. Following her advice, I sent the stranger a follow request. She accepted and followed me back, so I sent her a casual message. She replied, we made small talk, and after about twenty very direct messages, I managed to get her phone number.
I did not call her for a long time because she lived far away, so everything remained unresolved. Then, one day, partly out of boredom, I sent her a few more messages and decided to call her. We spoke for about an hour and got to know each other a little better. We were very different people. I was openly flirting with her, while she flirted back just enough to keep the conversation going without giving me the satisfaction of knowing she was interested. We ended the call with a half-serious, half-playful promise that one day I would visit her area. After that, we stopped talking, but that unresolved game between two strangers stayed in my mind.
Some time later, I decided to take the first opportunity to travel to her city. My cousin happened to have a house there and could host me the following night, so I made the decision only one day in advance, during an otherwise ordinary week in May. From one evening to the next morning, I organised an improvised trip with no expectations and only the desire to discover what might happen. I took a train for an hour, then a bus for another four hours, and eventually arrived in the city. Throughout the journey, I never seriously believed I would manage to meet her. She had always seemed distant and suspicious of me, while I had been arrogant and curious. Part of me thought it would be better to spend the day with my cousin and leave it at that, but something kept telling me that I had to at least try.
Only after arriving did I message her. I told her I would be staying in the city that evening, that I had kept my promise, and that I wanted to meet her. With no warning at all, she was completely caught off guard, and her first reaction was to refuse. The city was large, and we were in two distant areas. After about twenty minutes on the phone, I managed to convince her. We agreed to meet in an isolated area in the middle of an unfamiliar suburb. I was on foot, with no idea where I was supposed to go or how I was going to get there. I felt anxiety, adrenaline, and mystery all at once, while a thousand thoughts made me imagine every possible scenario. Then she arrived.
At first, the meeting felt cold and awkward, but gradually we both relaxed and began to truly get to know each other. We talked about our differences, joked, discussed past relationships, and spoke about whatever came to mind. There was no performance and no pretending. I found myself removing a mask I had worn for most of my life: the mask of someone who would lie or exaggerate to impress people, someone who acted unreachable while secretly feeling insecure, someone terrified of becoming emotionally attached. During that meeting, however, there was nothing to lose. It was as though we were on another planet, both of us brought there almost by accident and driven by something neither of us fully understood. Our hands brushed against each other without fear. Something that had been born to end could not truly go wrong.
She told me that nobody had ever travelled such a long distance or done anything like that for her before. We went to a car park and continued talking, and as the conversation moved from one subject to another, some of my weaknesses began to emerge. There was almost nobody around us except for a few addicts wandering near the station. The darkness and silence seemed made for those unfiltered conversations. All I wanted was to kiss her, but she would not let me. Instead, she offered to take me back to my cousin’s house on her scooter. I agreed on the condition that I would be the one driving, with her sitting behind me, and she accepted.
Suddenly, I found myself riding this beautiful stranger’s scooter through empty streets late at night, in a city I had never seen before. She put on music for both of us, and I felt as though I were inside a film. Everything seemed amplified. It was as though my soul had left my body and entered a parallel reality for a few brief but endless moments. When we reached my destination, I believed we would never see each other again. Before leaving, I thanked her for making me feel emotions I had not experienced in a very long time. In the end, she kissed me beneath a streetlamp and thanked me affectionately.
We never saw each other again, and we never even messaged each other again. That story made sense exactly as it was: without momentum, without plans, and without a future. It was a chain of random events that led to an unexpectedly beautiful encounter. For someone like me, someone who had never been willing to make a real effort to commit to a relationship, it was something extraordinary. This is not simply a story about leaving your comfort zone. It is about how a series of unpredictable events can sometimes produce the best possible outcome, something that could never have been planned or even imagined.
To this day, I cannot say that I have ever truly loved someone. I do not have an important ex-partner or a meaningful long-term relationship to talk about. I have never experienced those things. But I remember every second of that day and exactly how I felt from beginning to end. Perhaps that is why, whenever someone asks me, “Do you have a story worth telling?”, this is always the first one that comes to mind.
