We’ve been on at least six dates, and he still hasn’t kissed me. I can count the dates. Apparently, that is the only part of this arrangement I can confidently put a number to.
It’s been about a month. We game together all the time, he seems eager to talk, and our dates are genuinely fun. I like him. The problem is that the things that make me like him are also making it harder to tell how much he likes me.
If we were having a terrible time, I would at least have a reasonably clear situation to be disappointed about. Instead, I have someone whose company I enjoy and who keeps spending time with me. That feels promising. It just hasn’t come with a kiss or a conversation about getting into a relationship.
I seem to be waiting for a kiss or a conversation to tell me how to read everything else. A kiss wouldn’t answer every question about us, but it would settle one fairly pressing question about whether we both wanted to kiss. A relationship conversation could give the whole month a name. So far, neither has happened, and I’m trying to interpret enthusiasm for another conversation as if it came with footnotes.
The gaming is part of what makes this confusing. We don’t only see each other on dates and disappear until the next one. We have that regular contact too. There’s something easy about having a shared activity, something to do while getting to know someone. The ease is real. Whether it means the same thing to him that it means to me is the part I can’t establish.
I’m inexperienced with dating, which makes six dates feel like both quite a lot and possibly a number I have assigned far too much authority. I don’t know what pace he expects. I only know that I expected things to have moved further by now, and every good date makes that expectation harder to dismiss.
He could like me and be hesitant. He could be uncertain about what he wants. He could simply be enjoying this at a different pace. None of those possibilities becomes a fact because I spend longer thinking about it. My particular worry is less generous: that I like him more than he likes me, and that the lack of a kiss is the bit I should be paying attention to.
Bringing it up sounds straightforward until I imagine actually doing it. I want to know whether this is going somewhere romantic, but I’m afraid of making our easy time together awkward. Asking wouldn’t create the difference in our feelings, if there is one. It could, however, make it much harder for me to keep overlooking it.
