You Don’t Need Another Sign. This Is The Sign

There comes a point in certain dating situations when you are no longer waiting for a sign. You have several signs. What you are waiting for is one with better news.

He has not made a real plan in two weeks, his messages appear whenever the mood and cellular service happen to align, and every conversation about “where this is going” leaves you with the peculiar feeling that you somehow know less than you did before. Then Tuesday morning arrives and he sends, “Hope you’re having a good week :)” and suddenly the smiley face has acquired a significance normally reserved for medical test results.

Your sensible friend says, “He’s just saying hello.”

You say, “Yes, but he never uses smiley faces.”

This is why sensible friends can be so irritating.

Attraction has a remarkable way of turning intelligent women into extremely generous interpreters of vague information. If your girlfriend told you a man had said, “I’m not looking for anything serious right now,” you could understand the sentence while applying mascara.

When the same words come from someone you adore, however, right now begins to shimmer with possibility. Maybe he is cautious. Maybe his last relationship wounded him. Maybe he simply needs time to discover that the woman who will restore his faith in love has been sitting across from him in excellent lighting all along.

It is a beautiful theory. It does require quite a lot of unpaid imagination.

One Lovely Dinner Can Become Surprisingly Powerful

Confusing relationships are rarely made entirely of bad moments. If they were, nobody would be confused; we would simply leave and perhaps order dessert somewhere else.

The trouble is that one wonderful evening can acquire extraordinary influence. There was wine, easy conversation, that long look across the table, and for several glorious seconds you forgot the existence of taxes. Naturally, this dinner is now called as a witness every time somebody mentions the following three days of silence.

“But you don’t understand how connected we were.”

Perhaps. But candlelight has been helping people look emotionally available for centuries.

We tend to give beautiful moments more authority because they feel meaningful, while ordinary behavior seems dull by comparison. Yet relationships do not actually live at the charming restaurant where somebody ordered sea bass and said something unforgettable. They live in the rather less cinematic territory of Wednesday afternoon, where somebody either follows up or does not.

A lovely evening can be absolutely real without being a preview of coming attractions.

That distinction saves an astonishing amount of unnecessary detective work.

The Romantic Power of the Word “Maybe”

Then there is the famous non-plan.

“Maybe we can do something Friday.”

A perfectly ordinary sentence—until you are attracted to the person saying it.

You hear Friday. Your friend hears maybe.

By Thursday afternoon, someone else invites you to dinner and you respond, “Let me see what I’m doing,” although the answer is technically nothing. Friday has somehow become unavailable because of an event that does not yet have a time, location, reservation, or confirmed participant.

An imaginary date has acquired exclusivity.

By seven-thirty on Friday evening, your phone is lying face-up beside you with an importance wildly disproportionate to its retail value, and you announce that you were actually looking forward to staying home.

Of course you were. You just happened to keep your evening, your hair, and possibly your very good shoes in a state of diplomatic readiness.

The interesting part is not that somebody failed to make a plan. It is how quickly their uncertainty became your accommodation. A vague possibility entered the room and you immediately moved the furniture around for it.

That is often what uncertainty does when we like someone: it encourages us to contribute more. We follow up, smooth things over, suggest another date, revive the conversation, and provide such thoughtful explanations for the other person’s behavior that, frankly, they could hire us.

And then we ask, “But how interested are they?”

Hard to say. We have been doing some of their part.

Sometimes the Answer Needs Less Assistance

There is nothing glamorous about stepping back, despite what certain dating advice might suggest. You do not need to disappear for exactly seventy-two hours, become suddenly mysterious, or arrange to be photographed laughing beside a cocktail with people nobody has ever seen before.

You simply stop helping quite so much.

If someone says, “We should get together,” you can allow that lovely little sentence to remain in the wild for a while and see whether it eventually develops a date and a time. If a conversation goes quiet, you do not have to rush in with conversational CPR before anyone has established that it is actually dying.

This is not a game. It is information.

When you stop supplying all the momentum, you finally get to see whether the connection has any of its own. Sometimes the other person steps forward beautifully and you discover that you were worrying unnecessarily. Sometimes the whole thing becomes remarkably still.

Silence can be very articulate when we stop interrupting it.

And that is why another sign is not always useful. If you have been asking the same question for three months, receiving the same vague answer in different outfits, and repeatedly hoping the next lovely evening will rewrite the previous weeks, the problem may not be a shortage of information.

Sometimes we call something “confusing” because “disappointingly clear” feels a little severe before lunch.

So before you reread another message, convene another girlfriend summit, or allow a strategically placed smiley face to reopen the investigation, look at what happens when nothing exceptional is happening.

That is usually where the relationship tells the truth.

The sign may have been there all along.

It simply had the poor manners to arrive without candlelight.

You don’t need another sign. This is your sign.