His mother kept talking to me, which is how I ended up meeting the family of the man I had specifically agreed to keep things casual with. I hadn't set out to make a family introduction part of our arrangement. Apparently, that part didn't require an appointment.
I'm 25, he's 24, and we met on a dating app in September. I was clear from the start that I was only interested in sex. He agreed. This wasn't a case of me quietly hoping for something serious while pretending otherwise. As far as I understood it, we wanted the same thing.
We made plans, and from that first day onward, he started texting me good morning. Then came messages throughout the day. He also takes me out every weekend. For something I had described quite narrowly, it has acquired a fairly full schedule.
This is my first friends-with-benefits arrangement, so I don't have a previous one to compare it with. My friends say you're not supposed to text each other all day, every day. I apparently entered a setup with rules everyone else had already read.
The tricky part is that none of those things, taken alone, tells me what he wants. A good-morning message isn't a request to be exclusive. Going out together doesn't automatically cancel what we agreed. But when the contact fills the day and we spend time together every weekend, I start wondering whether we're still describing the same thing.
Meeting his family made that harder to shrug off. His mother was the one who kept the conversation going, so I can't treat the introduction as evidence of some carefully planned next step. Then he told me I was the only person who'd met his family in about four years, since his breakup. That is a substantial footnote to a casual arrangement.
Meanwhile, I'm still talking to other men. He's the only one I'm currently sleeping with, but that isn't the same as agreeing that neither of us will see anyone else. I haven't stopped treating this as casual simply because our weekends could look like dating from the outside.
He may enjoy the company and the sex without wanting a relationship, or he may want something different now. I don't know. What I do know is that my friends' rules can't tell me which of those is true for him, and counting his messages won't produce an answer either.
I was able to tell him plainly that I wanted sex at the beginning. Now I'm wondering whether to ask him just as plainly what he thinks we're doing.
