When bad timing happens to good people

Timing is crucial. And sometimes cruel.

I dated a guy once who seemed great but was fresh off a broken engagement. SURPRISE! He ended up not being ready for a girlfriend. If the timing had been different, things might have worked out — for a little while.

If the timing isn’t right, it doesn’t matter if you’ve met a great person, if they would have liked you at another time, in another place. Things just won’t work out.

This is the stuff of movies.

Ladies, think “The Notebook,” “Titanic” and “Casablanca.” Guys, think “The Dead Zone,” “True Romance” and “Cast Away.”

Timing is really wicked when you think about it. Meeting someone special is already so hard, and sometimes when you do you’ve just lost your job and your priorities are elsewhere. Or you might find someone fantastic when you’re leaving for the Peace Corps or graduate school. Or your honeymoon. (OK, I hope that’s never happened to anyone out there.)

I’ve seen my friends cry over missed relationships.

One girlfriend had a grad-school buddy whose ex got pregnant just as he and my friend started liking each other. This same friend had another boyfriend who she tried to work things out with, but they didn’t succeed until the night before she was supposed to leave to study abroad in Ireland.

Sigh.

This happens so often that my friend Angie is suspect of men pushing 40 who hit on her. She expects that they all screwed over some great girl when they were 28 because they weren’t ready. Then all of a sudden they realized it was time to settle down with a nice girl of childbearing years.

My boyfriend, “Novio,” told me he met a nice girl once, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. They met at a wake.

P.S., it was her mom’s.

“I thought she was cute, so I got her number and called her the next weekend,” he said.

They went out a week later. At first she thought it was funny that he asked her out in such an awkward situation, but nothing came of the relationship.

“We didn’t even kiss,” Novio said. “I think I got a hug out of it.”

He understood that things couldn’t have worked out. It was all good anyway, because he was moving to Mexico a few weeks later.

He asked out another girl at the end of his freshman year of college. She had just gone out with another guy and turned Novio down, saying she didn’t casually date more than one guy at a time. Then she asked him out when she became single again, but he had just started dating someone new and shut her down.

Reader Stacey had another example. I talked to her a few months ago about long-distance relationships and she told me about a great guy she was seeing.

They’d dated briefly about eight years ago. They remained close friends and started dating again in the spring, right before he planned to move to Chicago for culinary school.

“He says he realized it might be his last chance to tell me how he felt about me. I adjusted to the idea of him as more than a friend and here we are, ridiculously in love,” she told me at the time.

When I checked back with her, though, she told me they’d broken up. Not because they didn’t love each other. Because of bad timing.

Lest anyone accuse me of being too negative, I have a closing story that will make you want to throw up a little.

Reader Danyel said she’d dated a “less-than-stellar” guy for four years and kept trying to make it work.

“Why, I have no idea,” she said. “He never wanted to commit and took every opportunity possible to prove it.”

Three years ago she met another man through a friend.

“Very nice guy, I thought in the beginning … but he was married at the time, not happily, and of course my mind was stuck on the loser boy.”

But she and the married guy remained friends until he decided to profess his feelings, which she said she couldn’t believe because of his marital status. Plus, she was trying to work things out with her boyfriend.

Until the boyfriend landed in jail for several months. That was enough to make her realize she was better off without him, she said.

Recently, she caught up with the second guy. She said he told her he was divorced and had never stopped caring about her.

“After talking several times on the phone we decided to go on a date. The date lasted eight hours and we talked about everything under the sun. The conversations we had made me realize that this was the man for me to hold on to, and I am fortunate enough that he has never let go of me. Now that the timing is right and my emotions are where they need to be, I look forward to going the distance.”

There’s a happy ending for you. Don’t get greedy, I’m not the mushy type.