Does “right person, wrong time” actually exist?
Or is that just a story we tell ourselves to feel better at night?
They say timing is everything. In comedy, in the stock market, in catching the last train home. But somewhere between broken engagements and blossoming careers, I have started to wonder if timing is just love’s favorite scapegoat. This week, a question landed in my advice column that many of us have asked ourselves before: What do you do when the person is right, but the timing refuses to be?
Met a guy fresh out of a broken engagement. We ended up falling in love and dating seriously for about a year. He broke up with me because he wasn’t over his last relationship, ready to commit, or dealing with mental health. Our relationship was otherwise great. He even said it was the best relationship he’s been in. I know I shouldn’t wait out of respect for myself. We’re both in our early thirties, and it’s hard to find people you really click with. I am also in a period of my life where I am making decisions that will shape my career/next few years, and I want to make those decisions with a clear head and make sure that I am choosing what’s best for me. What should I do?
- Committed to a Non-Committer
Don’t wait (duh)
I had a similar scenario happen to me a few years back. I was in the kind of situationship where the connection was undeniable, but the commitment was perpetually “coming soon.” Then it happened to a roommate of mine, and then to one of my best friends. It’s practically an epidemic. At this age there are so many reasons people might not be ready to jump into a relationship: half-healed heartbreaks, careers in flux, therapy homework they haven’t started. The candidates are real, and so are their excuses.
So I’m going to give you the answer you don’t want to hear: Don’t wait. The risks of putting your life on hold for something that might never work out are steep: you don’t just lose the time; you lose who you would have become (or would have met!) in that time. You cannot make clear-headed choices about your future while keeping one eye on his.
You already know this; you said it yourself, “Out of respect for myself,” which tells me your head has already filed the paperwork and it’s just waiting on your heart’s signature.
How do I feel good about not waiting?
But I don’t think you wrote to me so I could re-slam that idea back into your head. You already know not to wait. What you want is to feel good about the decision to stop waiting. And I think that leads us to the bigger question on a lot of minds: does “right person, wrong time” actually exist? Or is “wrong time” simply a merciful story we tell so we don’t have to say, “right person, but not for them”?
For me personally, nothing comes to mind faster here than Carrie and Big. (Spoilers ahead, though if you haven’t watched Sex and the City by now, that’s honestly on you.) When they meet, Big tells Carrie he doesn’t believe in marriage. They date for two years before she ends it because he decides to move to Paris without even telling her. And then, BAM: he meets a girl in Paris, and they end up engaged. And Carrie is left standing there asking the question that launched a thousand brunches: Was it me??
For the romantics, the phrase “right person, wrong time” is a life raft: it wasn’t us, it was the calendar. For the cynics, what they’re subconsciously looking for is the pain that accompanies the squashing of hope. Tell me it was about me so I can be mad and get over it! And even the ones who claim they don’t want to know? They’re wondering.
And here’s where I give you the second answer you probably don’t want to hear: ultimately, we’ll never know. There are 7 billion people in the world, and anyone who tells you that there’s a one-size-fits-all-answer to the complicated reasons people do things is very obviously lying to you (or themselves). We may love to share anecdotes over brunch about the guy that got married after years of telling people he “wasn’t the commitment type” or the girl who ended it with someone only to get back together and realize it was the biggest mistake of her life. But those are just stories. And we’re too old for bedtime stories at this point—both the ones that scare and the ones that comfort.
Beware of anyone who tells you with certainty that it’s because he wasn’t into you, and beware of anyone who assures you it was purely circumstantial; they are preying on your hope, or your cynicism, or your flat-out inability to handle ambiguity. The hard part about life is that we almost never get clean answers to the what-ifs. The harder part is we’ll have to live with it.
And the hardest part? That’s accepting that a person can be right in many ways and still not be the person you should choose. “Right person” is not only about chemistry or how good the relationship feels. It also includes the ability to choose you at the same time you choose them.
Great, but how do I get closure?
Most people think moving on requires certainty, so they invent it. He was a liar. She has attachment issues. Any story will do, as long as it slams the door. But you don't have to keep wondering what's going to happen, why it happened, or what it all meant.
My advice is to use this as an opportunity to get comfortable with living in the in-between. Outside of dating, you’ll be faced with uncertainty all the time (waiting on job offers, biopsy results, apartment applications), and you’ll have to learn how to deal with these things without pausing your entire life until the answer arrives. The only way out of these things, ultimately, is to keep moving.
Your brain can’t force your heart to move on, but the good news is that you don’t have to. You can find closure without certainty, and it exists within yourself. True closure doesn’t come from deciphering someone’s feelings or intentions; it comes from deciding what you want to do about them. It is coming to peace with what is out of your control and reclaiming your agency with what is.
What does that mean here? Go on dates. Try to fall in love with other people. This is exactly what I did: I re-downloaded Hinge and left it up to the stars. Either I fall in love with someone new before he comes back, or he comes back first. In either version, I’m getting to my destination—happily in love—as fast as I possibly can. If they come back too late? Whoops, their bad. And if they never come back? It’s even better that I got a head start on dating. That’s the advice I gave my friends too: You’re the prize, and it’s their loss they put you up for grabs. Your job is to hopefully no longer be up for grabs the minute they want you back.
But what if they were rare? Or worse, what if they’re the ONE?!?
And now, the final boss of breakup questions. Yes, people you truly click with are rare. But here’s where I ultimately land on the whole “right person, wrong time” debate: I don’t believe in it. Not because timing can't be wrong (it absolutely can) but because the right person wouldn't be in the wrong timing with you in the first place.
Timing isn’t some external force that happens to a relationship. Timing is part of what makes someone right for you. The “right person” can’t exist in a vacuum. Compatibility was never just about chemistry floating in space; it always included whether they could actually commit. A person who cannot do that isn’t the right person who arrived early. They are a person who was right in some ways, at a time when the ways they were wrong mattered more.
And a second thing the phrase gets wrong is that it smuggles in the idea that there’s just one right person—one soulmate, tragically misfiled by the universe into the wrong decade of your life. There are so many right people for you. So maybe they were “right”? Fine. But so what? Somewhere out there is a right-person-right-time person, and they will be even righter because the right person doesn’t come at the wrong time.
Like a parking spot in Los Angeles, plenty of things in life are rare—but I’m not going to waste mine mourning every spot I didn’t get. There’s someone out there ready to commit to you right now, and I believe that’s the only kind of rarity worth waiting for.
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As someone who has been questioning if we met at the “wrong time,” this made me feel better. I’ve been telling myself that, even though he was great, I know for certain that my husband and/or life partner will be sure about me the first time. His inability to choose me because of circumstantial reasons is nothing but excuses. And I started to second-guess and question whether he is my person, but the wrong time. It left me so conflicted. However, my heart knows that the person who meant to spend my life with me won’t take a gamble on losing me ever…
As someone who trudged through life wondering the same and came out on the other side, I want to assure you that there's someone so much better than what you could never imagine waiting on the other side. Please don't stop and keep going...do the work on yourself (this one’s important), cry, fail and maybe make some more wrong choices..it doesn't matter. Everything will lead you home. The bad ones and the good ones are just making a way for the magic ✨