I was having a fun time chatting with someone who messaged me out the the blue on Facebook. He found me because I was advertising a room. I’m a woman, and we’re both in our 30s. Normally I wouldn’t be interested in talking to some random person, but he asked me a lot of questions about my life, was engaging, and generally funny and supportive. We had a great back and forth and discussed our mutual interests, which included a lot of nerdy stuff. We didn’t explicitly say we would date but he seemed very interested in me.

We finally had a chance to meet today with our dogs, and it was pretty bad. It was a casual deal meet up in the park. I dressed relatively nicely, and he looked slobby, but that wasn’t a big deal. The worst was that he made me do all the work, starting and moving along all the conversations. He didn’t make a single joke, and looked standoffish when I tried to engage him in jokes. I don’t think he even smiled. I was able to get him to talk a little about his nerdy interests, but he showed little interest in me. I paid attention to and praised his dog, and he ignored mine. He checked his phone frequently. I didn’t even try to talk about the emotional stuff I was curious about and we had discussed, because he was so distant and I didn’t want to make things more awkward.

He posts online about having depression and other issues, so could this be social anxiety? However, people with social anxiety usually at least try. If he thought I was unattractive in person, he could at least try to talk to me to be polite. I’m just feeling very insulted right now. I haven’t been on a date in a long time, and I feel really disrespected and disheartened. I know it’s easier to think of funny and interesting things to say online, but having someone not even try is awful when he went to a lot of effort to ‘court’ me online. Was this just laziness? What went wrong?