One-Sided Dancing: When You Want Him More Than He Wants You

There is a very awkward kind of romance in which you are deeply interested in a man, while he is deeply interested in the fact that you are deeply interested in him, and for a while those two things can look remarkably similar.

You like him, so naturally you move toward him. You text, you flirt, you suggest coffee, you laugh at something that was perhaps a six but receives an eight because you are feeling generous, and he responds warmly enough that before long you think the two of you may actually be getting somewhere.

Except sometimes you are dancing and he is mostly standing there enjoying the music.

He is not necessarily cruel, and he may not even be deliberately misleading you; he simply likes what is happening. A woman he finds attractive wants him, looks delighted when he appears, listens to his stories with unusual interest, sends affectionate messages and generally makes him feel like a man whose arrival improves the room.

Why would he object? Most people do not throw admiration out of the window simply because they are not planning to marry the person delivering it.

And that is where things can become wonderfully confusing, because you send a message and he answers, you invite him somewhere and he comes, you kiss him and he kisses you back, and suddenly it looks very much as though the two of you are dancing.

Well... perhaps.

But if every time the music starts you are the one walking across the room, taking his hand and pulling him onto the floor, it may be worth noticing what happens when you sit down.

This is not a game about making him chase you; it is simply one of those revealing little experiments life occasionally performs for free. Remove your effort and see whether there is still a romance, because some connections become so quiet afterward that you can practically hear the furniture settle.

And this can be especially surprising because while you were doing all that moving, he really did appear interested.

Of course he did. He was participating in something pleasant, and participation is not always desire.

Imagine a man you have absolutely no romantic interest in telling you that you are beautiful, bringing you coffee and sending you a funny message. You smile, enjoy the coffee and answer because the message actually was funny, while he quietly concludes that the two of you are slowly falling in love.

You would be alarmed.

From your side, you were simply being friendly and enjoying perfectly nice attention; from his side, three coffees and a laughing emoji have already acquired a soundtrack.

Women can do exactly the same thing when we really want the ending.

A man says, “You looked beautiful tonight,” and suddenly we begin adding emotional subtitles. He stayed late, so he must feel something; he kissed you, so obviously something is growing; he said he had a wonderful time, and somewhere in the distance the orchestra is already warming up.

Meanwhile, the man may indeed feel something. Attraction, affection, curiosity, lust and fondness all exist, and human feelings come in many attractive little packages.

The question is whether whatever he feels makes him move toward you when you are not pulling.

This sounds terribly harsh until you remember how often you have felt exactly that way about men yourself. There have probably been perfectly respectable men in your life whom you liked enormously and had absolutely no desire to kiss.

One could arrive looking handsome, smelling wonderful and carrying your favorite flowers, and your heart might still remain seated with its handbag firmly on its lap.

You cannot reason it onto the dance floor.

Yet once we want a particular man, we can become strangely convinced that his attraction is simply running late. Give it time, let him get to know you, show him another side of you, and perhaps after dinner number seven he will suddenly put down his fork and realize you are the woman he has been waiting for since birth.

It makes a lovely scene, but it also places you in the exhausting position of constantly supplying new evidence.

You become funnier, warmer, easier, more patient and magnificently understanding. You give him space when he disappears and enthusiasm when he returns, because perhaps the perfect combination of availability and mystery will finally crack whatever mysterious little safe is protecting his feelings.

At some point, you are no longer dating; you are operating a one-woman romantic festival.

And he may keep attending, which is exactly what makes the whole thing so sneaky.

If he were cold, rude and completely unavailable, the situation would be obvious, but he may be affectionate when you are together, charming when you call and perfectly happy to spend a night with you while doing remarkably little to make the next night happen.

So you keep mistaking his willingness to receive the relationship for a desire to create one.

Those are not the same thing.

Sometimes the clearest answer arrives when the woman finally gets tired and stops carrying the music, not as a strategy and not with some grand announcement, but simply because she stops pushing the next moment into existence.

And then there is silence.

Not because she ruined anything, but because she finally stopped supplying the part that had been making it look alive.

That is perhaps the strangest thing about chasing a man who is not really into you: for months you can believe the two of you are performing a duet, only to discover that the moment you stop dancing, he does not miss a step.

He was never really dancing.

He was enjoying the show.