I believe there was flirtation and intent with Charlie, but Charlie was obviously having the same flirtation with two (or more) people at the same time - Phil and Stephen - and Stephen seemed to want to move more at Charlie's speed based on the rate things progressed from the time they met to when they were officially dating. Dan definitely didn't steal Charlie; as the timeline page says, that would have been fairly impossible. But (pure speculation) I think that Charlie's issue was more years later wishing he'd picked Phil instead. I mean... the relationship he chose over Phil ended bitterly and somewhat violently, while Phil moved on to have a storybook love and become a millionaire with the guy that came along right after Charlie.bluecaterpillar wrote: ↑Mon Sep 16, 2019 11:43 am felucca made a post about charlie in the faq which i'll quote some of here:
i think phil and charlie's supposed 'relationship' to each other gets overexaggerated and made into something it's not because the 2013 twitter drama kept charlie more relevant to the phandom compared to other old-school yters from 09 and earlier who nobody really remembers in connection with dan or phil. the narrative about dan 'stealing' phil doesn't really hold much water when you look at the timeline.felucca wrote:They communicated frequently per Twitter, Dailybooth, Skype and phone and they had a collab channel together called pabloislove. They met in March of 2009 and filmed a video that Phil at some point removed from his channel prior to 2012. No one appears to have saved the video before deletion. The Zoo Day video thumbnail can be seen on the wayback machine [link] and his tweet promoting the video remains online.
There is nothing definitive stated by either of them at the time to indicate a relationship, and they seemed to fall out of constant contact within a matter of months after meeting in real life. In June of 2009, around the same time Dan and Phil first began talking, Charlie began dating a mutual friend Stephen (3sixty5days). The four of them were friends up until Charlie and Stephen's messy breakup in 2010 that resulted in Charlie breaking Stephen's nose.
anyway, given how much coty skated over discussing actual relationships, phil's earlier dating life remains a mystery. but given that he said he joined a dating site and used uni as a way to meet other lgbt people on campus, i don't think it's a stretch to assume he was dating/hooking up at least a certain extent, even if he didn't have a super committed relationship or fall in love at that point.
In the video Phil said that he had never had someone for Valentine's Day before, so we know definitively that he'd never been in a relationship that was more than a calendar year long. (We are all generally on the same page that vday video was real now, right? Or are there still people that somehow believe it was a prank?) I am fairly sure he at least tried to have some dating/hook up experience at university though his insistence that he just wanted to date on the dating site says maybe he held off on hook ups because he did want a relationship and didn't really find that until Dan.