He’s unsure about his ex/is newly sober

I’ve been seeing a guy from online dating for a few weeks. I am 35F and he is 34M. Our first date was great. We sat and chatted at a bar and lost track of time, but it turned out to be 3.5 hours. Second date was going out to a nice dinner (he paid). Third date was at my house and I made us a nice meal and he brought me a bouquet of flowers. That night was the first time we made out since we had just pecked goodbye after the second date. The making out was honestly very good and showed me there’s a ton of physical chemistry, but we controlled ourselves and didn’t take it much further other than some cuddling. Before he left that night, he asked if I wanted to hang out for New Years Eve. I felt a little nervous spending a holiday with someone brand new, but I also didn’t have other plans and figured why not. I said sure and we said we’d figure out the plans as they got closer. NYE was three days from that time. I find him incredibly adorable and charismatic, he’s a successful small business owner, I look forward to seeing him before dates, and he makes the effort in communicating between dates. Perfect start, right?

I had friends visiting in between our date and NYE so we didn’t communicate much then. This guy is newly sober (abstaining from alcohol) and he was going to a concert the day before NYE. For clarification, even though our first date was at a bar, he just drank water. I touched base with him on NYE morning and we caught up about our last couple of days. He said he had a lot of fun at the concert the night before but now he is feeling sick. Some of what he texted made me think maybe he broke his sobriety (he said something about a “self indulgent mood”) but I wasn’t sure since he was mostly describing cold symptoms. I told him to let me know if he may perk up for the evening time and he said he was going to take it easy for the night but that he hoped I could find something fun to do anyway. Ouch! I realize people can get sick out of nowhere but he was pretty nonchalant about our plan to see each other, so I interpreted it as a blow off with a chance of him actually being sick. We didn’t make specific plans for NYE so although I was disappointed, it is what it is.

The next day he texted me and asked how my day was going. I took my time in responding considering the blow off but once I did, he immediately asked to make plans. We agreed to see each other the next day and do something low key since the meal I made on date 3 was kind of intense and time consuming. So we opted for a take out/movie night. The date was going well but we didn’t make any physical moves until halfway through the movie. We kissed for a few minutes and he stopped. He asked me whether I was still “Bumbling” (we met on Bumble) and said he wanted to talk about some things that he was having a hard time with lately.

He told me that an ex (if you can even call her that) who he dated for 3 weeks about 1 month ago was contacting him again and he wasn’t sure why. The indicates that we probably went on a first date just a week or two after things ended with them, but I am not certain of the exact timing. She broke things off after a bad night of drinking and he had explained to me before that this situation was a wake up call for him in terms of getting sober. He’s been working with a longtime therapist and seems to be on solid track, fully realizing that he is an alcoholic, fully realizing that his relationship with alcohol has ruined a lot of things in his life. He’s been sober for several months before but tends to think he’s doing well, revisits with a drink or two, then goes off the rails. He’s committed to ending that cycle. The thing about this ex is that she was also a heavy drinker. He said it was kind of a “fling” because of the timing but that it was a very intense, visceral connection in which they were contemplating whether they were soul mates. So obviously a breakup after that is going to sting. I kinda just picture it like an alcohol fueled few weeks where chemistry may be flying around but nobody’s thinking straight. But who knows, I wasn’t there. So, he said that he knows things are building with us physically and he figured we may take things to the next level on this date and potentially sleep together. But he didn’t want to do that with this background drama in his life. He said he didn’t want to sleep with me without me knowing what was going on, or progress our relationship just to fuck it up later. He made it clear that he very much wants to have sex with me, but he didn’t want to just get laid and potentially hurt me after. He has not seen the ex, it sounds like she’s just texting him to say hi but he’s confused as to what she wants because he thought the door was slammed shut. I asked him if he was still in love with her and if he would get back together with her if she wanted to. He said he wasn’t sure. He said he’s very confused about how he feels and he recognizes that we have something great so far, and he doesn’t want to close the door on something that could be a great thing. Sorry, lots of door analogies. We talked about it for about an hour and a half. He also confirmed that he was actually sick and not hungover (I asked), he did not drink at the concert and he went to bed at 8:30pm on NYE. I asked a lot of questions and ultimately we decided that it was too early to end things with us. We are brand new but we both agreed that there’s a lot of potential. He said he would talk to his ex to set things straight, talk to his therapist too, and we’ll just see what happens. I told him I would let him know if I change my mind about remaining open to dating him. I also told him that I was seeing one other person (I’ve been on one date with another guy and we both said we want to go on a second). This all happened two days ago and we have texted a little but don’t have any plans made for another date.

Major TLDR: things started out amazing with this guy minus the red flag of being newly sober, but I was giving him the benefit of the doubt with that. The second red flag is this ex. I guess two red flags in a few weeks really isn’t so amazing after all. We’ve literally only been on 4 dates, have done nothing physically below the waist but we want to. Part of me is like, this isn’t a big deal especially as of right now. Lots of people date and have other messes going on behind the scenes that are only cleaned up once the new relationship becomes exclusive. I’ve done it. But I’ve been thinking about it constantly and am bummed that someone I have such a strong initial connection with may not be ready for something new. I do think that life is often messy and sometimes not everything can be a picture perfect rom com, but I don’t want to get hurt. What would you do, Reddit? Do I jump ship entirely, or keep calm and see how it plays out? Thanks for reading my novel. Brevity has never been my strength.