What a beautifully written piece. You could be describing my husband — and I’m one of the ones for whom a relationship with this kind of personality has worked out. Maybe it’s because we got together later in life after knowing one another for many years. As in, thirty. At our wedding, he was teased for having the slowest-to-kick-in pickup line in history.

Honestly, I’m not sure that if we’d gotten together when we were young that it would have worked. But now I have all the gifts of this amazing relationship, and I know in my bones that he’s in it for keeps.

I can imagine the devastation you must have felt. But while life is short, it’s also oddly long, and there may be such a man in your life, perhaps years from now, who lights you up — and is fully ready to stay, because he’s been around enough to learn that shyness is not the same thing as humility.