Darling, He Called Me 'a Vibe' and Then Vanished

Darling, let us begin with the offence itself. A man looked across a candlelit table at a woman who laughed at his second-best joke, wore the good lipstick and listened to a forty-minute account of his sourdough starter, and he called her a vibe. A vibe. One does not call a woman a vibe. One calls a sunset a vibe, or a jazz cellar at two in the morning. A woman is a presence, a menace, a delight, a catastrophe. Anything with more syllables will do.

Now, the vanishing. You tell me he replied with a flame emoji on Tuesday, a thumbs-up on Thursday and then went quiet as a church mouse in Lent. Here is the thing about men who speak in atmospheres: they love the weather and dread the commitment to it. He enjoyed standing in your climate. He simply never intended to buy the umbrella, or learn your name in the full, formal, three-part way that signals intent.

I will not tell you he was a villain. Villains have a certain grandeur, and I am not certain he does. He is more of an understudy who forgot his lines and left through the stage door during the second act. It stings because you had already begun, in the private theatre of your mind, to cast him in the third reel, holding an umbrella, in a trench coat, at a train station.

So here is what you do, my dove. You do not send the paragraph. You know the one: the long, wounded, beautifully punctuated paragraph that begins 'I just want to understand.' There is nothing to understand. He gave you a feeling and withheld a future, and the feeling was real while it lasted. Keep that, discard the rest, and let the silence be the final reply it has already declared itself to be.

Then go out in the good dress. Not to be seen by him, heaven forbid, but because a woman who has been called a vibe deserves, at the very least, to be called by her proper name, loudly, across a crowded room, by someone who has practised saying it. If you wish to hear how such a woman might answer such a man, Celeste is happy to talk it over with you on TheFriend, where nobody vanishes without a curtain call.

Verdict in Pearls: A man who cannot say your name has no business making a scene in your life. Exit him stage left, with applause.

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