He said yes to drinks, and I realized I had arranged an evening without establishing what kind of evening it was. I knew we were meeting in two weeks. Whether we were going on a date was still unconfirmed.
I'm 29, he's 27, and we met on a weekend work trip with roughly twenty people. We work for different companies in a similar industry, in the same office building. We spoke briefly on the trip. There was enough there for me to want another conversation, so when we got back, I asked him to coffee near work.
He agreed. We talked for about half an hour, partly about work but mostly about other things. That felt encouraging to me: we'd met through work, but work hadn't needed to carry the entire conversation. It was also only coffee. I couldn't reasonably promote half an hour to proof of attraction just because I'd enjoyed it.
Afterward, I added him on Facebook, and he accepted. A couple of weeks later, I contacted him again and suggested drinks. Another yes. Nothing in that sequence had gone badly. It was simply a sequence in which I supplied every next step and he agreed to take it.
That is the detail I keep coming back to. I don't mind making the first move; I've now made enough of them to demonstrate that. But I would like some sense that I'm moving toward someone who's interested, rather than organizing a very agreeable man's social calendar. His willingness to meet matters. So does the fact that I don't yet know whether he would have asked me.
I've asked male friends how they would read the invitation, and their answers have not reduced the paperwork. Some think coffee followed by drinks takes things beyond a professional acquaintance. Others think a man wouldn't keep meeting a woman one-on-one unless he was interested. Then there's the entirely plausible view that after-work drinks are normal between people in the same industry. Apparently, the beverage has no universally recognized romantic status.
I can see why each reading is possible. The trouble with borrowing someone else's certainty is that none of my friends is the man I'm meeting. Their answers tell me how they might interpret an invitation like mine. They don't tell me what he understood when he accepted it.
Of course, I could ask him directly whether this is a date. That answer is obvious enough that I'm already aware of it. What's harder is being that explicit when I've initiated everything so far. If he's responding out of friendliness, naming my interest would make it harder to keep pretending I was merely suggesting something to do after work.
I'm trying to go in without expectations, while hoping there's at least some attraction on his side. Those two ambitions are currently sharing a fairly small space. For now, we've had the coffee, he's accepted the drinks, and there are still two weeks before we meet. The invitation is settled. I haven't quite worked up to asking about the date.
