I have two not so great stories from the weekend. Here's the first...

Before this weekend began, I declined an invite to meet a woman off Hinge this weekend due to reconsidering our hour distance. I was nervous to let her down because we'd chatted on the phone as well as text over the past week daily, but was surprised at how well she took it to the point she asked if we could still be friends. I chalked it up to the fact that I mistook the depth of her interest with the fact that she is probably just very social with everyone.

I genuinely thought she wanted to be friends, so I still engaged in conversation as it came through, but it started to become apparent that her responses were shaded and passive aggressive. The first one was a reply to something she wrote me first, and made it a point to bluntly tell me that she didn't have time to reply to me -- as if she wanted me to know that she was out doing something, probably because we were supposed to hang out this weekend. I sent her a link to something I was reading that we had talked about earlier, and again, the tone of his reply read like she wanted to debate me on the topic rather than be on the same side of the conversation like we previously had been. Her messages were shorter, and it felt like she wanted me to feel like I did something wrong.

At this point, I told her that I could not help but feel like her messages were being passive aggressive, and that while I enjoyed talking to her previously, I did not want to do so if this is what it amounted to. She dismissed that she was being passive aggressive, and then brushed me off saying she was very busy all weekend (which was funny because she apparently had a ton of free time and flexibility to meet me just a day prior) and ended the text with a "Take care."

The thing I didn't initially disclose is that the distance wasn't the only reason I declined meeting her. It was because all last week, her texts toward me were too frequent, and it made me feel uneasy. There was one day when I was very busy and wasn't around to text her that day until the evening, but before I could do so, she wrote "I haven't heard from you all day. I thought I would have." That raised an eyebrow with me, and that was my red flag that got the wheels spinning about how something was off here. While I told her it was the distance between us that was why I didn't want to meet, and I gave her the benefit of the doubt to try to still be friends, she proved my gut instinct correctly afterward by going out of the way to be passive aggressive.

For what it's worth, this woman was a few years older than me (42) and pretty successful in her career as a project manager for a pharma tech company, and I'm once again just incredibly jilted by the experience because dating really, really sucks and is brutal.