When our conversation runs out, he asks another question. It might be about work; it might be something personal; it might be so random that I wonder how he found it. Whatever the subject, it performs the same useful service: we are still talking.
We met at a work event two weeks ago. Since then, he has texted me every day, weekends included. During the working week, the conversation goes on throughout the day. Apparently, meeting me came with a commitment to keep in touch. I missed that part of the event program.
We are both in our late thirties, both already in relationships, with lives and family commitments around us. We also live in different countries, although he often comes to mine for work or family. So this is not two single people who met locally and are working their way toward a Friday-night drink. There is rather more existing life in the way.
Still, it is hard not to notice the effort. He does not seem content to let an exchange finish naturally. A subject ends, and another appears. The personal questions matter to me because they make it difficult to file all this under professional networking. I have known work conversations. They usually allow everyone to leave.
What he has not done is flirt. There have been openings where he could have taken the conversation in that direction, and he has left them alone. No unmistakable move, no moment that answers the question for me. Just another day of messages from a man who appears to have plenty to say to me, except the particular thing I am trying to work out.
My own habits are not helping. I would not spend every day talking to a man I did not fancy at all. That makes his attention feel like evidence of attraction, because I know what this much attention would mean coming from me. It is a persuasive argument with one small administrative problem: I am supplying both sides of it.
He might enjoy the conversation as friendship. He might be attracted to me and keeping it within limits because we both have partners. He might enjoy an ambiguous exchange without wanting it to become anything else. Those possibilities can look remarkably similar on a phone. Counting messages does not tell me which one I am receiving.
The distance adds another wrinkle. We are not routinely in the same room, where an expression or a pause might give the conversation a different feel. Yet his regular visits mean he is not simply someone who lives impossibly far away. There is a real chance of being in the same country again, without any arrangement between us to make that romantic.
I am not saying we are about to act on anything. Whether we would is a separate question, with other people involved. Before that, I am stuck on something smaller and, apparently, quite consuming: does he actually fancy me? Fourteen days in, I know he can keep a conversation going. I still do not know why he wants to keep this one going with me.
