It is not uncommon for two people to carry on a long-term online and/or phone-based relationship and then have it fall apart when they finally get in the same room together. It's just two different realities. You can really convince yourself of anything while chatting away online. You can convince yourself that you have a romantic relationship if you want to. I have heard people refer to people they've only known online (and never in person) as boyfriend/girlfriend; how ridiculous is that? Then you factor in that you've known them before, you're reconnecting and it seems like old times and there's your recipe for disaster. The way I see it, this is a "virtual dating" problem, fueled also by your past history with him.

I might as well spill, briefly...I too, reconnected with an old grade school flame, someone I'd also spent romantic time with briefly over the intervening yrs until she got married in the mid-90s. We reconnected after her divorce, I forget the circumstances. The main thing to remember here is that I had this "image" of her from ages ago, front and center of my consciousness, ok? This is what I envisioned as we wrote and chatted and so on, with her. The last time I dated her, in my early 20s, we both talked about moving to N. Africa and writing and painting. Okay, we were dreaming large, I admit. But that was the last serious time I spent with her, so fast forward to a few yrs ago and I've heard she's gotten divorced and there's of course still some lingering chemistry but after a few dates and talking about our career plans, I realize it's never going to work, and it's certainly never going to be like it was 15 yrs ago. In fact, though I really care deeply for her, the spark was not really there and sadly, I used the pretext that the distance and work schedules were the problem when in actuality, it was that I no longer felt the spark. When you really love a person, you do anything to make it work, right?

This may be the case for your friend but I would at least allow for the possibility that he was very sincere about his intentions but when he realized that he was not capable/no longer desired what you had talked about with him over previous months, he was ashamed, embarrassed, incapable of articulating his change of heart-and simply bolted without a word. This does not make him a bad person, nor does it mean his feelings were not genuine, it just means that when faced with the actual reality of the situation vs. what had been in his mind all those months, it was no longer feasible or desirable. It also does not excuse him from leaving like a thief in the night. My two centavos.