About twenty minutes after a perfectly nice phone conversation with my friend, I called him back to announce that I liked him romantically. Then I reminded him that I would see him in two weeks and ended the call. The whole thing took about ten seconds. Efficient, if the goal was to give us both something to think about.
We’re both 21, and we’ve known each other through college for a couple of years. Over the past year, we started working together more closely, and somewhere along the way I developed a crush. He’s quiet until you get to know him. And I had started looking forward to our conversations as more than conversations about work.
We spent time together one-on-one a few times in May. Once, he mentioned wanting to go on a picnic but having nobody to go with. I suggested a group outing. If that was an opening, I had helpfully invited several other people into it.
After he graduated and moved a couple of hours away, we didn’t have much contact for a few months. In September, a conference brought me to his city, so I suggested meeting up. While we were together, he mentioned having two tickets to a movie premiere in my city later that month. I said yes.
We ate at a restaurant before the premiere. It also occurred to me that on almost every occasion we’d gotten food together—about three times—he had paid. I noticed, but three meals weren’t exactly enough to settle whether these were dates.
A few weeks ago, I suggested meeting in a city halfway between us. He asked what was happening there. Nothing, I explained; I just wanted to hang out. He floated coming to my city and helping with projects, then changed his mind, all within a few minutes on the phone. This is a man who once thought a fifteen-minute drive to a store was too far. I wasn’t sure how to interpret the travel arrangements.
We both work in film. Back when we were doing projects together, we’d stay on Zoom for another half hour after everyone else left. More recently, we’ve started calling each other, and we both initiate. A film question can turn into an hour about our lives and future plans. He also asked about seeing a live show in New York City, five to seven hours away from us, and said he’d email his contact about VIP tickets. I was up for it.
Eventually, I decided I would rather tell him than keep trying to work out what all of this meant. So after our call that night, I called again. I told him I liked him, made it clear I meant romantically, and admitted that the announcement was a little random. I didn’t want to keep sitting on it.
I wasn’t expecting an immediate answer. I wanted him to have room to think, without the pressure of me waiting for a verdict. I also knew this fairly direct delivery wouldn’t be wildly out of character for me. There was time for him to say something; I just didn’t leave us much room for a whole conversation.
We have a festival coming up, so I finished by saying I’d see him in two weeks. He quietly said that he’d see me then, too. And I hung up.
