Nearly three years ago, an email arrived from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the social networking website for people in professional occupations. Unlike Facebook, the main purpose of LinkedIn is not social. It’s business. It has since become the hottest website for job seekers.

Well back in spring 2010, the email I received was not about a job or work. It was telling me that Neil had sent me a message via the website, seeking contact.

Out of the blue.

Neil was the only person I dated who ended up not a friend. That was because the relationship ended badly.

We worked together at a restaurant in the mid 1990s. We both had good senses of humor and we loved using big vocabulary words. He asked me out, we went to dinner, and then we ended up dating over the summer.

Neil was very smart and very clever. He was in his early 20s but wasn’t happy with where he was in life and where he wanted to go. He didn’t really have a home. He crashed at our buddies’ houses. He was looking at doing training for our restaurant chain, but that wasn’t really where his passion rested. I knew he was bound for something different and more intellectually challenging.

By the end of the summer, our relationship was foundering. I had started working at a TV station as a journalist and was becoming more focused on that. Neil became more distant. His sardonic wit I had admired was turning rude. I would call where ever he was staying and he wouldn’t take my calls. I went over and he wouldn’t answer the door. Eventually, I heard from a mutual friend that Neil had hooked up with a server at another restaurant. Then Neil just seemed to vanish from my restaurant.

I saw Neil two more times in my life: a coworker funeral and at another restaurant where he was working years later. But we didn’t keep in touch.

Now, I was receiving a LinkedIn message from him 15 years after he melted out of my life.

I replied to the message.

Neil had been busy since I saw him last. He attended law school, passed the bar exam, and was working with the largest law firm in my previous city. He volunteered working with debate students at high schools. The month he contacted me, he was getting married to a woman he had met online.

It might seem out of the blue, but not really. The timing was not a coincidence. His wedding had obviously trigggered memories of me and maybe of his previous workplaces. The point is that he sought to clean up a little of his past.

We did not talk about what happened with us. In fact, we didn’t even bring up the fact we had dated or that he had behaved rudely. We didn’t need to.

Despite my tendency to take things personally, I didn’t this time. I knew he had been going through a turning point in his life back then. It wasn’t about me.

Sometimes you just know when it’s all okay and there’s no need for drama.