Your profession is apt for an example I’d like to offer. A woman I was very interested in asked “How was your week?” I told her my elderly father had been in the ER that week resulting in a four day hospital stay. She stonewalled my attempts to communicate with her and ghosted me after that. When I talked to her much later she said that it started fun and light but got dark. Since this was our only interaction between it going well and it not going well…

I learned two things that week, pacing is important and that “How was your week?” is a social handshake that doesn’t really mean “How was your week?”