A mutual friend once decided I needed a holiday romance.

You know the kind of friend. Equal parts cupid and chaos agent. The sort who sees two gay men in the same country and goes, “Oh my god, you’d be perfect for each other.”

And for a brief moment, we kind of were.

I was overseas. He was charming, easy to be around, and exactly the kind of person who makes a strange city feel warmer. We had that quick, concentrated intimacy that travel sometimes gives you. A little bit of fantasy, a little bit of projection, a lot of novelty. We spent a bit of time together, got swept up in it, and by the end of it there was talk of him coming to Sydney.

Not just visiting Sydney. Visiting me.

He wanted to stay with me.

Now, even then, I wasn’t 100% comfortable with the idea. Inviting someone you’ve only really known in a very specific, fleeting holiday context into your home, your actual, real-life, sacred little cave, is not nothing. But I said yes. Against my better instincts, but yes. Because it felt exciting. Because I’m generous. Because sometimes you let the fantasy stretch a bit further than it probably should.

So for a couple of months, we messaged.

We talked about plans.
What we’d do.
Where we’d go.
What Sydney I’d show him.

It all had that lovely anticipatory energy of something not-yet-real. Easy to enjoy because it was still living in possibility.

And then one day, he FaceTimed me.

Which, in itself, is rarely a neutral act.

He wanted to tell me something.

He’d met someone.

Another Australian.

And when he came to Sydney, he was going to stay with him instead.

Apparently they’d met on a night out and were in love.

And honestly? I was fine with it.

Truly.

No dramatic heartbreak. No secret yearning. No montage of me staring wistfully out a rain-covered window. If anything, my dominant feeling was relief. My home and safe space were mine again. No awkward hosting. No sharing my bathroom with someone whose favourite version of me existed mostly in holiday lighting.

Also, if I’m being real, I don’t put too much weight on international romances. They’re often just lovely little suspended realities. Sweet while they last. Not necessarily designed to survive geography, routine, or ordinary life.

So yes, he’d met someone. Great. Mazel tov.

Then, because life loves a sequel, part of his accommodation with the other guy fell through.

Suddenly, he wanted to stay with me again. Just for some nights.

That was a no.

A polite no, but a no.

Because I wanted my place to myself.
Because I value my peace.
And because I don’t let people reject me and then circle back when they need the other side of my bed. Or my guest towels. Or my emotional flexibility.

That’s not bitterness. That’s standards.

I have too much respect for myself to be someone’s fallback plan because their great love story had a temporary logistics issue.

Still, we planned to hang out. And I meant that sincerely. We were all going to go out together: him, the new guy, and me. Also totally fine. I wasn’t jealous. I wasn’t secretly plotting anyone’s downfall. I’d moved on, and quite comfortably.

But what I wasn’t expecting was how cold he’d be.

And the thing is, there wasn’t even much opportunity for him to be cold. That was the shocking part.

That night out, that was the only time I actually saw him once he got to Sydney. We didn’t spend a whole day together. We didn’t even really hang out properly. It was just a few brief dances. A few moments in passing. That was it.

And somehow, even within that, the shift was obvious.

Not tension. Not awkwardness. Actual coldness.

This person I’d had a lovely little connection with overseas, who’d planned to stay with me for a week, who’d spoken to me with warmth and ease for months, suddenly acted like I was someone they vaguely knew from a friend’s birthday three years ago.

All surface. All politeness. No softness.

And that, weirdly, is what stayed with me.

Not the change of plans.
Not the new romance.
Not even the audacity of trying to re-book my apartment after choosing someone else.

It was the way people can rewrite intimacy so quickly when it no longer fits the story they’re currently telling themselves.

And then there was the part that really made me stop and think: our mutual friends aren’t really his mutual friends anymore either.

He stopped hanging out with them. If he wasn’t working, he was talking to this new guy around the clock, and this wasn’t someone local. They were over 2,500 kilometres apart. For all intents and purposes, he’d found himself a very intense pen pal and decided that was enough to shut out the rest of the world.

That part was wild to me.

Not because I’m cynical about long-distance feelings. People can connect deeply across distance, of course they can. But there’s something so unsettling about watching someone disappear into the idea of a person so quickly that everything else: friendships, presence, the actual life in front of them, just seems to fall away.

It felt less like romance and more like total emotional tunnel vision.

Maybe that’s what happens when someone becomes less a person and more a projection. Less a real, lived relationship and more a fantasy fed by distance, anticipation, and constant access through a screen.

And maybe that was the clearest sign of all that I’d never really been dealing with something grounded. Just a different version of the same fantasy, redirected.

Sometimes people meet you in a certain context: overseas, in a heightened little bubble, in the romance of travel and possibility, and they really do mean it in that moment. But when the context changes, so do they.

It doesn’t mean it was fake.
It just means it was temporary.

And temporary things can still be real. They just don’t always become permanent ones.

I’m glad I said no. Glad I protected my space. Glad I trusted the part of myself that knew I didn’t owe access to someone just because they once made me feel chosen.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:

You can be gracious without being available.
You can be understanding without being accommodating.
And you can wish someone well without offering them your home, your energy, or your spare pillow.

That feels like growth.

Or at the very least, excellent boundary setting.

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Do I think the guy might see this? Maybe.
Am I’m being a bit messy to publish it anyway? Probably.
Could they learn something from it? Definitely.

But who doesn’t love feedback!?