They don’t want to be with you. That’s the cold, hard truth of it.
And I know that hurts right now. I know that’s a very hard pill to swallow. It’s much easier to tell yourself, If only the timing was better, if only x or y was different, then we’d be together.
But when it comes to real love, timing doesn’t matter, x and y don’t matter. When you really, really want to be with a person, you’ll move mountains to do so. You’ll fly across the country until you can finally live in the same city. You’ll stay up late just to have a little more time with them (even if you have to be up at the crack of dawn). You’ll make room in your busy schedule to see them or you’ll hop on a thirty-minute bus across the city to spend an hour with them or you’ll take an emotional jump with them even though you’re still recovering from a broken heart. This is what you do when you’re in love.
Love takes you out of your routine. It takes you out of your comfort zone. It takes you out of your regular world. It takes you to a place where your brain shuts up and your decisions are made instinctively, based around whatever it is you need to do just to spend one second more with them.
So when someone tells you that they’re “not looking to date right now” what they really mean is that they’re not looking to date you. Sometimes they know this and they’re trying to let you down easy. Other times they really, truly believe that their life has no room for love right now – not realizing that if they really wanted to be with you, their brain would figure out a way to make it work anyway.
The best thing you can do in a shitty situation like this is to love yourself enough to be honest with yourself. The “I’m not looking to date right now” line can be a softer blow initially, but most of the time, it takes you a hell of a lot longer to get over it. Because when you cling to this life raft, your brain will come up with a million scenarios of how it possibly could work in the future, and a million if-only’s that will take your sanity and keep you awake unit three in the morning. This statement, this one sentence of theirs that you will replay in your brain over and over, is only keeping you in a broken-hearted purgatory, never allowing you to move on or to quite let go of the possibility that they still want you.
What you need is to be blunt with yourself, to say the very thing that they could not. Say it in your head. Say it out loud. They don’t want to be with me. Whether or not they will be ready to date sometime soon, it will not be with me.
Maybe this seems cruel initially. Brutal, cold, callous. But in reality it’s just another form a loving yourself – loving yourself enough to save yourself from the purgatory that is never moving on. 
