Epigraph:
Some people claim there’s a woman to blame but I know it’s my own damn fault.
—Jimmy Buffett, “Margaritaville”
I. Meeting Litz Online
I met Litz on Tinder right around the end of April 2026, just about two and a half months ago today. Relationships often begin before either person realizes that anything has begun. Two strangers exchange a few messages, one of them sends a photograph or a joke, and suddenly an event that seemed inconsequential at the time becomes the first scene in a story.
Within a few days, Tinder suspended my account after yet another unsuccessful attempt to satisfy its increasingly byzantine photographic-identification system. I had failed this test before many times. The platform’s technology remained unable to determine that the large, slightly tired-looking man holding the phone was the same large, slightly tired-looking man depicted in the photographs directly beneath him. I found this highly frustrating, although by then it hardly mattered. Litz and I had already begun speaking elsewhere.
The first thing she sent me was a voice message. It lasted only a few seconds. I believe she simply introduced herself. What I remember best is her voice: low, warm, and unexpectedly musical. Litz had once been a professional singer. In her early twenties, she had received a recording contract in South Korea despite speaking little or no Korean at the time. I still do not entirely understand how that arrangement came about, but after hearing her speak I understood why someone might have wanted to record her.
Her voice reminded me slightly of Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies—not because they sounded identical, but because both possessed a quality that is difficult to manufacture: intimacy without effort and deeply sensual. To be frank, her voice turned me on immediately, and almost as quickly she did too. Litz could make a routine greeting sound private. Even when she was discussing work, groceries, family obligations, or the weather in Kochi City, I sometimes had the feeling that she was singing under her breath.
I told her how much I loved her voice. She later told me that she had fallen for me almost immediately. I cannot honestly say that I proceeded with greater caution.
Over the next six weeks, we talked almost every day, usually several times a day. Some calls lasted twenty minutes. Others lasted an hour, two hours, or longer. There were mornings when we spoke shortly after waking, afternoons when one of us called while walking somewhere, and nights when we continued talking long after both of us had run out of any practical reason to remain awake. By the time we met in person, we had accumulated hundreds of hours of conversation.
We discussed our families, our marriages, our children, our work, our financial worries, our health, our failures, and our hopes for whatever remained of the future. I have one adult son; she has two adult children. We spoke about the different paths that had carried us into our early fifties and about the lives we might still construct from there. We talked about music, food, travel, friendship, jealousy, loneliness, and sex. We also talked about nothing at all, which may be the greater test of intimacy. It is relatively easy to tell another person the dramatic events of one’s life. It is harder to remain interested while that person describes a difficult customer, a delayed train, an irritating piece of paperwork, or what she intends to eat for dinner.
With Litz, those ordinary conversations rarely felt ordinary.
At the time, I was emerging from a marriage that had lasted twenty-nine years. My wife and I had mutually decided to divorce earlier that spring, although the practical and emotional consequences of that decision were still unfolding. I had not lived as a single man since my early twenties. I had almost no recent experience of dating and even less understanding of how quickly two people could create a private world through their phones.
My mother and several other people cautioned me that Litz and I might be moving too fast. They were not hostile to her, nor were they trying to discourage me from beginning a new life. They had simply lived long enough to recognize acceleration when they saw it.
In retrospect, they were right.
At the time, however, the speed felt less like recklessness than recognition. After so many years inside one relationship, I mistook the intensity of discovery for certainty. Litz and I had not yet confronted the thousand small realities that distinguish knowing someone from imagining that one knows her. We knew one another’s histories, preferences, fears, and fantasies. We knew how to make each other laugh. We knew when the other person sounded tired or distracted. We knew which subjects produced excitement and which could quietly darken the mood.
That felt like knowledge. Some of it was. Some of it was projection. We also became virtually intimate before meeting in person. We had phone sex only twice, although the number is less important than what the experiences represented. Both of us had been lonely, and the intimacy provided a necessary outlet and a sense of closeness across a considerable distance.
At other times, when her work schedule or my obligations made a longer encounter impossible, we exchanged photographs or allowed each other brief intimate glimpses through the phone.
I do not include this information to be provocative. It matters because the relationship did not begin as a cautious friendship that slowly became romantic after a series of conventional dates. Emotionally and sexually, we had already moved far beyond introduction before we occupied the same room. By the time I traveled to Kochi, we had created expectations that neither of us fully understood.
For most of those six weeks, we had almost no disagreements. Litz sometimes expressed concern about whether I brushed my teeth frequently enough, an impressive question given that she was hundreds or thousands of kilometers away and had never stood close enough to inspect them. I assured her that I did. She remained unconvinced. This should perhaps have told us something.
Mostly, though, we were happy. We called each other baby. We spoke openly about becoming engaged and, eventually, getting married. We discussed travel plans and imagined a shared domestic future with the confidence available only to people who have not yet attempted to share a bathroom, a schedule, a kitchen, or a narrow futon.
I knew we were rushing. I rushed anyway.
I returned to Japan on June 12, two days before my fifty-second birthday. Almost immediately, I began arranging the trip to Kochi. Traveling there from Kyoto or Osaka is neither impossible nor particularly convenient. The round trip cost roughly ¥25,000, and the journey consumed much of a day. At fifty-two, a man should perhaps think carefully before spending that amount of time and money to meet someone he knows primarily as a voice emerging from a small electronic device. I went nonetheless.
By the time I reached Kochi Station, it was close to eleven at night. The late arrival eliminated any possibility of a proper birthday dinner. We bought snacks and wine instead and carried them back to a hotel near the station, where we did our best to turn convenience-store provisions into a meal.
There was an unavoidable strangeness in seeing her at full human scale. For six weeks she had existed inside photographs and rectangles, her face appearing or disappearing according to the strength of the connection. Now she was standing beside me, very small and entirely real. Litz is only four feet eleven inches tall. I am six feet three. The physical contrast between us was nearly comic, although neither of us seemed troubled by it.
We talked, drank wine, ate our improvised dinner, and gradually adjusted to the fact that the person we had imagined was now close enough to touch. The transition was easier than it might have been. Her voice was the same voice. Her humor survived the journey out of the phone. The affection between us did not vanish under the brighter and less forgiving light of an actual room.
We slept together that night and again the following morning. The sex was very good, but what mattered more was the sense of confirmation surrounding it. Whatever else we had misunderstood, the attraction was real. We were comfortable enough to laugh, to pause, and to begin again. Nothing felt forced. The night seemed to promise that the emotional and virtual intimacy of the previous six weeks could become an ordinary physical life.
Had the visit ended the following morning, I might have returned home convinced that we had been right about everything.
But eight hours together seemed inadequate after six weeks of anticipation and a ¥25,000 journey. Litz had an apartment in Kochi City, and I asked whether I might stay with her for a few days. She kindly agreed and began rearranging her work schedule so that we could spend more time together. I was, and remain, deeply grateful for that generosity. Inviting someone into a small home is an act of trust. Inviting a new boyfriend who is more than a foot taller than you and has arrived carrying the accumulated habits of twenty-nine years of marriage may be an act of courage.
I expected to remain for several days.
I stayed for ten.
For the first time, Litz and I would no longer be two people describing our daily lives from a distance. We would have a daily life together. We would wake in the same room, eat the same food, negotiate the same space, and discover whether the ease of our conversations could survive the pressures of proximity.
For the first few days, it did.
II. On Learning Someone in Person
By the end of my stay, I had remained in Kochi for about ten days.
Those ten days contained enough happiness to convince me that our relationship had real promise. They also contained enough friction to suggest that promise alone would not be enough.
Very quickly we settled into something resembling a small domestic partnership. Litz would go to work, though she had generously arranged her schedule so we could spend much more time together than originally planned. I cooked when I could, helped with the laundry, cleaned the apartment, ran errands, and generally tried to make myself useful. In the evenings we wandered around Kochi, stopped for drinks, browsed little shops, cooked simple meals together, and continued discovering one another in the quiet rhythm of ordinary life.
Those ordinary moments are, after all, where real relationships actually live. The first few days were wonderful. Then, almost imperceptibly, small tensions began to appear. The first involved something so minor that I still find it difficult to believe it became an issue at all.
I am a smoker. Rather than smoke inside Litz’s apartment, I stepped onto her small balcony several times a day. While smoking I would occasionally call my family or a close friend back in Kyoto. I was speaking quietly, during the daytime, on private property. To me it seemed entirely unremarkable.
Apparently one of Litz’s elderly neighbors felt otherwise.
The neighbor contacted the building management company and complained that the foreign guest next door was smoking and talking on the balcony. The management company called Litz and politely asked if her guest could simply take phone calls inside the apartment instead. That was all.
There was no threat of eviction. There was no confrontation. Nobody came to the apartment. No police appeared. No lease violations were mentioned. It was, from everything I could tell, a routine request that could have been solved in approximately thirty seconds.
I would gladly have stopped taking calls on the balcony. Instead, something else happened. Litz panicked.
When she told me about the call she was visibly shaken. She was close to tears. She repeatedly told me she might lose the apartment she had worked so hard to obtain. She imagined herself forced to leave. She imagined financial disaster. She imagined the worst possible outcome almost immediately.
I asked her a simple question.
“Baby, did the management company actually say you were going to be evicted?”
“No.”
“What did they say?”
“They asked that you talk on the phone inside.”
“I can absolutely do that.”
For me, the problem was already solved. For her, it had barely begun.
Looking back now, I understand that this was not really about balconies, cigarettes, or phone calls. It was anxiety. Real anxiety.Not theatrical anxiety. Not attention-seeking anxiety. Genuine anxiety that transformed relatively ordinary inconveniences into looming catastrophes.
I had not fully understood the depth of that tendency while we were talking online because online relationships naturally allow each person to present a calmer, more edited version of themselves. Daily life removes that luxury.
Unfortunately, her anxiety had an unfortunate side effect. It triggered my own. There are many unpleasant emotions in life, but few I dislike more than chronic stress. I can handle sadness. I can handle disappointment. I can even handle uncertainty reasonably well. Constant anxiety, however, is simply not good for me.
As Litz became more anxious, I found myself becoming more anxious in return. Neither of us wanted that. Neither of us knew quite what to do about it.
Other small disagreements gradually appeared. From my perspective they were simply the kinds of adjustments every new couple eventually faces. From her perspective they often carried greater emotional weight than I expected.
For example, she became increasingly interested in my daily routines.
How many times was I brushing my teeth? Why had I skipped shaving that morning? Was I taking proper care of myself?
These were perfectly reasonable questions in another context. Had we been married for twenty years, they might have seemed almost affectionate. But we were not married. We were not engaged. We had only recently met in person after knowing one another online.
I was fifty-two years old. She was in her fifties as well. I thought that certain decisions about my grooming, my appearance, and my daily habits still belonged primarily to me. I tried to explain this as gently as I could, just as she tried to explain why these matters genuinely concerned her.
Neither of us was entirely wrong. We were simply beginning to discover the practical differences between two people who had fallen in love through conversation and two people attempting to share everyday life. The gap continued to grow.
Reflecting on our first six weeks together, I am increasingly struck by something that I already knew to some extent. There is, in fact, a tremendous difference between getting to know somebody online and getting to know them in person. This may seem obvious. However, my time with Litz underscored that truth in ways I genuinely did not expect.
By the time I finally left Kochi, we were still together. We were still affectionate. We were still physically intimate. We still considered ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend. But beneath the surface, the first fault lines had begun to appear.
III. One Day at a Time
When people hear that a relationship has ended, they almost always want a simple explanation. Someone must have been the villain. Someone must have made the cheated. Someone must have loved less, cared less, tried less, or failed more spectacularly than the other. Real life rarely works that way in my experience.
Litz is one of the kindest people I have ever met. She is generous with her time, devoted to her children, remarkably hardworking, and capable of great tenderness. She also struggles with anxiety in ways that sometimes make ordinary life much harder than it needs to be. I, meanwhile, have my own collection of flaws. I rush into things. I value independence almost to a fault. I can be stubborn, dismissive of worries that seem obvious to others, and too quick to believe that every problem has a quick solution. These qualities have served me well in some areas of my life. In this relationship they sometimes made matters worse.
Neither of us was trying to hurt the other. We were simply carrying different histories into the same room. And perhaps that is what every relationship really is: two biographies attempting to occupy the same present tense. Sometimes they fit together naturally. Sometimes they require patience neither person yet possesses. Sometimes they arrive at exactly the wrong moment, even when the feelings themselves are genuine.
I do not regret meeting Litz. I do not regret falling in love with her. I certainly do not regret the laughter, the conversations that lasted until sunrise, the train rides, her little apartment in Kochi, or the quiet mornings when, for a little while at least, building a future together felt entirely possible. Those moments were real. They remain real.
Today, Litz and I are no longer boyfriend and girlfriend. We are, however, still good friends. We continue to care about one another and talk on the phone, and we both hope that time will provide perspective where emotion sometimes could not. We are discussing the possibility of traveling abroad together later this year. If this happens it happens and if it does not it does not. In either case, we will travel as friends, not as a couple.
The challenges in our relationship were the product of two imperfect people, each bringing old habits, old fears, old hopes, and old wounds into something new. That is not failure. It is simply the complicated business of being human.
So I will keep trying. To become a better man. A better friend. And, if circumstances ever allow, a better boyfriend. I hope Litz finds the same peace she has always wished for me.
Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame. But I know it’s my own damn fault. Perhaps.
Dedication:
For my friend Litz. Let’s just take things one day at a time, baby.
Note: Interested readers may also wish to read the love poem I wrote for Litz during the early part of our relationship. This poem is linked below.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 