I'm processing a failure to launch /breakup. Having a hard time with it because I really liked her.

We matched on Feeld. Her age was 44 on her profile. I'm 53. When we actually got to talking, she told me that she's 33. This made me a little cautious, but she seemed to really like me.

We went out on three dates over the course of 7 weeks (she was unavailable for a month there). All three went really well, she stayed the night two of the three times. The third time she was planning on spending the night but there was something going on with maintenance at home (she got a text from her roommate) so she had to be home the next morning but she didn't find out about that until 11:00 the night before. Now, you might be thinking that she was lying about that. But I was there when she read the texts and she was not happy about going home.

She left something at my house. She asked me to bring it over the next day. Which I did. But we had an odd exchange when I dropped it off at her front door because... I don't understand why actually. She's very private so I think she didn't want me to show up on her ring camera or something? She asked me why I came to the front door and I was like I didn't know I couldn't. Now, you might think that she was cheating. But I am pretty sure she wasn't. We can get into that if you need to.

So Saturday night we spend the evening together, have a great night, she tells me that she really likes me after I tell her that I really like her.

Then about 24 hours later she sends me a text that says she doesn't want to see me anymore. And I'm like but what's going on and she refuses to talk about it. The only thing that she will say to me is "you need to think about what you say to women and maybe you should take a break from online dating and meet women in real life". And that's it, she won't talk about it.

My best guess here: when we were in the car on the way back to my house, she was talking about her job search. She's a recent grad and we both work in software. As far as I know she has had no job interviews since she graduated. She got good marks, but it's not a great time to find a job. I'm also a software developer, about 20 years experience now. She was talking about other guys that she's dating and she said one guy might be able to hire directly. I did have a flair of jealousy here because I was like I can't hire her and he can and that sucks. But I know what she's been doing to look for a job and it's mostly been grinding leetcode. But from a hiring perspective, I don't really care so much about your ability to grind leetcode, I care about your ability to work within a team. So I told her that it would be a good idea for her to contribute to some open source projects because then I, as a potential hiring manager, would be able to look at the quality of your contributions and get an idea for how well you would work within my team.

I think this really bothered her that I said that. But I don't understand why it's problematic. It's the exact same advice I would give to a male software developer in her shoes. And I know precisely how hard it is to be a recent graduate who is having a hard time finding a job because that happened to me early in my career. But she told me I need to think about how I talk to women. Again, she is refusing to talk about it, so there's really nothing I can do except take guesses. She won't tell me what I actually said that bothered her.

I thought everything was going great and I feel like I got walloped upside the head with this one. I'm sad and I miss her. It looked like it was going to be a great dating situation if nothing else.