In a perfect world, you two would be a couple. But the timing isn’t right.

Maybe you just got cheated on and aren’t ready to trust again. Maybe he just got out of a serious relationship and wants to stay single for a while. Maybe you’re overly busy with work. Maybe he’s about to move across the country.

There’s something keeping you apart, even though you both want to be together. Even though you’ve both made it clear that you have feelings for each other. Even though, whenever you see each other, the sexual tension is off the charts.

You use timing as your excuse, and it sucks, because you can’t blame the other person. You can’t blame yourself. It’s no one’s fault. It just worked out that way.

You know you have to move on, but in the back of your head, you always think of him as a possibility. You imagine being with him in the future, when the timing is finally right.

Then a few months go by, maybe even years, and you see him with someone else. You notice that his relationship status changed or find a picture of them kissing or run into them holding hands at the mall.

And, even though you should be happy for him, even though you’ve dated other people too, you’re pissed. You feel like he betrayed you. So certain questions run through your head:

If he was ready for a serious relationship, why didn’t he ask me out? Did he forget about me? Did all of his feelings for me disappear?

You can’t understand why he would choose someone else over you. But he didn’t call you for the same reason you didn’t call him.

When the timing is off the first time, you get scared of risking rejection a second time.

You don’t want to call him up out of the blue and ask him if he’s ready to go out with you, because you don’t want him to turn you down. You don’t want to find out that he no longer has feelings for you.

Even worse, you don’t want to find out that timing was just an excuse and the real reason you were never together was because you didn’t like each other enough. Because he never really wanted you to begin with.

So, instead of ending up with him, you look at his new girlfriend and you wonder if he likes her as much as he once liked you. You wonder if he feels the same spark when he touches her, if he tells her secrets that should have been saved for you.

When you see him with someone new, you wonder if it wasn’t timing’s fault after all. If you should have tried harder. If you could have been together if you did something differently.

And you wonder, if you ran into him when he was single instead of when he was taken, would you have made a move? Would you have ended up together this time?

Or was it meant to turn out this way, were you destined to date other people?