What happened?

Here’s a hypothetical situation. Let’s say you met a guy while hiking the West Coast Trail this summer. A guy who happened to be funny and smart and cute and interesting.

Let’s say the two of you hit it off and sparks fly. But he lives in Calgary and you live in Vancouver. So you exchange phone numbers and email addresses, with a promise to keep in touch.

And you do. Long, flirtatious emails fly back and forth for about a month. He talks about coming to Vancouver. You start thinking, “Hey, maybe this could go somewhere.”

And then, suddenly, silence. You don’t hear from him in more than two weeks. At first you assume he’s just busy. After a few days, you wonder if you said something in your last email that offended him.

So you re-read it five, six, seven times, picking apart each sentence and looking at it from every angle until you’re 86 per cent sure only an overly sensitive, quivering mass of jelly could be offended by what you wrote.

Then you wonder if maybe he didn’t get your email at all, that it got blocked or lost, and he’s sitting there in Calgary thinking you’re the one who’s not interested. You want to ask him if he got your last email but decide not to because it seems sort of pathetic and desperate -- two things you most definitely are not.

Then you wonder if maybe he started seeing someone in Calgary. And while this makes you a little sad, you’re okay with it. You’re a romantic but you’re also a realist and you know these long-distance things rarely work out in the end.

You just want to know what happened before you close the door. Not knowing is driving you crazy.

So what do you do? Hypothetically speaking, of course.