You Thought He Chose You. He Had Messaged Everyone

Online dating can make two people feel equally chosen when only one of them actually did much choosing.

You know how you got there. You saw his profile, paused, read it properly, looked at the photographs twice and decided that yes, you liked this one. Not every man. Him. You even forgave the photo taken from slightly below the chin, which is a generous act and should not be overlooked.

He may have arrived by a very different route.

At the beginning, he was selective too. He read every profile, noticed who seemed funny, who lived too far away, who appeared to spend every weekend hanging from a mountain, and who had written “I love to laugh” as though the rest of us had taken a formal position against it. He sent thoughtful messages and waited.

Then came silence.

A few women replied. One was delightful for three days and vanished. Another answered twice and then apparently lost all interest in language. A third suggested meeting and then became strangely unavailable until perhaps 2047.

After enough of this, a man’s search can become less like careful curation and more like opening the refrigerator late at night. At first he knows exactly what he wants. Later, he is standing there thinking, “Well... what else have we got?”

His standards have not disappeared. They have merely become friendlier.

He still contacts women he genuinely likes, but now he also contacts women he might like, women who seem pleasant enough, and women whose profiles he has skimmed with the concentration normally given to hotel checkout instructions.

Then you answer.

You have no idea that his enthusiasm has recently broadened. You only know that he wrote to you, you liked what you saw, and after several profiles that inspired nothing stronger than polite indifference, this one made you stop.

So when he seems delighted that you replied, your mind performs one tiny piece of romantic arithmetic: I chose him, therefore he chose me.

Very reasonable.

Not necessarily true.

He may have contacted fifteen women that week, and you happened to be the one who answered with warmth, humor and an actual question rather than “haha.” His interest can become very real from that point onward, but it did not necessarily begin where yours did.

And this is where the situation becomes wonderfully confusing, because he may genuinely like you.

He may like you a lot... but not in the way you think.

He likes the dinners, the sex, your laugh, the fact that you remember how he takes his coffee and do not make him discuss feelings before breakfast. Friday night at your place starts to feel natural. Then Sunday morning does too. Somewhere along the way a toothbrush appears, followed by a shirt, a phone charger and an opinion about which Thai restaurant is “better.”

You notice all this and think, naturally enough, that the relationship is moving.

He notices all this and thinks, equally naturally, that the relationship is going very well.

Those two sentences are wearing the same perfume, but they are not the same woman.

You began with, “I want him.”

He may have begun with, “Let’s see.”

And “let’s see” can live an astonishingly comfortable life when the seeing involves good food, affection, sex and somebody being genuinely pleased when you arrive.

This is why a man can be warm, attentive and entirely sincere, yet become mysteriously foggy when the subject wanders beyond the pleasant present. Dinner next Friday? Of course. A weekend away next month? Lovely. Where is this relationship going? Suddenly he has the expression of a man who has been asked to assemble a French chandelier without instructions.

You may find this baffling because, in your mind, the answer began forming before the first date. You had already looked at him among other men and decided there was something there worth exploring. He may only have decided that after you replied, and even then his conclusion may have remained, “I really enjoy this, but we shall see”

Enjoyment is powerful. It can furnish an entire relationship.

It can produce favorite restaurants, private jokes, little routines, spare toiletries and a very convincing impression of permanence. What it cannot necessarily produce is certainty, although from the outside the two can look almost identical.

That is the small trap hidden inside high-volume dating. It is not that every man who sends a lot of messages is secretly indifferent, nor that affection appearing later is somehow counterfeit. It is simply possible for you to enter because you were interested in him, while he enters because you were interested in him first.

By the time that difference becomes visible, there may already be a charger beside your bed and a standing order at the Thai place.

Which is why some relationships feel so confusingly close to becoming something more. Nothing is obviously wrong. He likes you. He is comfortable. He keeps coming back.

You answered because you wanted him. He may have wanted you because you answered.

For quite a while, those two beginnings can look exactly the same over dinner.