The Difference Between Chasing and Showing Up in Love

The best lesson about dating may come from watching someone who wasn’t “trying” at all.

My friend Danielle has a theory about Sunday mornings at the park: it’s the one time people are allowed to be completely unavailable to the world without anyone taking it personally.

She said this while we were stretching near the fountain, watching a man hover awkwardly close to a woman sitting alone on a bench with a journal open on her lap and earbuds firmly in both ears.

“He’s been circling for four minutes,” Danielle murmured.

I had clocked him too.

He kept slowing his pace near her bench, waiting for eye contact that was never going to come. The woman’s body language was a closed door — shoulders inward, pencil moving across the page as no one else existed.

He eventually went over.

From 20 feet away, we watched her lips do the polite-but-firm version of “not interested” before she went back to writing.

Danielle shook her head slowly.

I nodded with the full authority of someone who had very strong opinions on the matter.

“Exactly,” I said. “The park, the gym, the coffee shop — they’re not hunting grounds. A woman with a journal and headphones has basically put a do-not-disturb sign on her soul.”

Danielle pointed at me.

We started jogging. I felt righteous about the whole thing for approximately six minutes.

…and I saw him.

He was sitting on a low wall near the dog run, unlacing his sneakers with focused calm. Dark hair, sleeves pushed up, forearms suggested he did something more interesting than just bicep curls.

A golden retriever sat beside him, equally unbothered.

I didn’t say anything. I just slowed down.

Danielle, who notices everything and forgives nothing, slowed down too.

“Pretty dog,” I said, not looking at her.

“Mm-hmm.”

We looped back around the path. I told myself it was because the second lap was always better for the heart rate. It had nothing to do with the path curved directly past the dog run.

“You’ve looked over twice,” Danielle said.

“The dog is right there. I was looking at the dog.”

“The dog hasn’t moved.”

“I wanted to see if it would.”

She said nothing, which was somehow worse than if she had said everything.

On the third lap — and I want to stress that three laps is completely normal for someone who takes their cardio seriously — I laughed a little too enthusiastically at something Danielle said.

Something that, honestly, wasn’t that funny. I also fixed my ponytail while angling my body toward the wall where he was sitting.

He was throwing a tennis ball for his dog and didn’t look up once.

Danielle stopped jogging.

“Okay,” she said. “Let me just — “

“Don’t.”

“You literally said, ten minutes ago — “

“I know what I said.”

“‘A woman with a journal and headphones has put a do-not-disturb sign on her soul.’”

“I remember.”

“And now you’re fixing a ponytail that doesn’t need fixing.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Took a long sip from my water bottle.

“He’s not going to notice anyway,” I said. “Men never notice.”

Maybe true, and women don’t like admitting it. We think the glance we held a half-second too long was basically skywriting. We think laughing with our whole face and casually angling our body in someone’s direction is practically a formal declaration.

Meanwhile, the man in question is entirely absorbed in whatever’s immediately in front of him — in this case, a golden retriever losing its mind over a tennis ball. I was invisible.

We sat on a bench. I told Danielle I was resting.

A few minutes passed. Then the retriever, bored with the tennis ball, spotted the woman with the journal and made a break for it.

The dog bounded over, put both paws on the bench, and began investigating her pages.

The man jogged over immediately, apologising before he’d even reached her. The woman looked startled, then looked at the dog, and laughed — the laugh that isn’t performed for anyone. She held the journal up out of reach while the dog tried to climb into her lap.

They talked for a moment. She reached out and let the dog sniff her hand. The man sat down on the far end of the bench — not close, just near. She went back to writing, but a few seconds later said something that made him laugh.

Both of them were unaware of this encounter.

Danielle and I sat in silence for a while.

“That dog,” she said, “did more in 30 seconds than that other guy managed in four minutes of slow-motion hovering.”

She was right, and I was too tired to argue.

The hovering man had a strategy. The dog had absolutely nothing — no plan, no opener, no awareness that it was even doing something remarkable. And somehow that was the whole point.

The moments that actually land aren’t engineered. They just happen, and you’re either loose enough to meet them or you’re not.

The hovering man was waiting to be let in. The dog simply arrived.

Nobody had a speech prepared. Nobody needed one.

I stood up, tightened my laces, and nodded toward the path.

“One more lap?” Danielle asked.

“Obviously,” I said. “For the cardio.”

She smiled and fell into step beside me without another word.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.