Wait… what makes you so sure? Did you ask her directly?
I mean, if I’m going on dates with multiple people, and they don’t bring it up first, I don’t come clean about it until after the first kiss.
I agree. But forget the email crap and call her to just touch base.
Something like 80 percent of human communication is non-verbal. It is those clues that decide the relationship. Email and texting cannot convey non-verbal communication correctly. They are sterile.
Call her. Just to touch base. Listen to her words and how she says them. The sound. The tone. When words spoken blend with how they are said, she’s being honest, even if it were to be something you don’t want to hear. When the sound/tone doesn’t match the words, there is a problem. You can’t do that in email or texting.
Is deafened by the loudest DING! in the world ever
Put it this way - if she called you right now what would you reaction be? I’m pretty certain it wouldn’t be “Oh my god she’s calling me, she’s clearly needy and I therefore resolve to never speak to her again. It’s a shame because she seemed really nice but them’s the rules” before diverting her to voicemail.
The best litmus test of someone’s sincerity when they say they like you is to give them the opportunity to hear from you, if they really do like you it’ll be welcome (assuming it’s not incessant and I think we’re all clear what you’ve done is not incessant). The alternatives are that they’re not sincere in what they say, and you’ve lost nothing by letting them demonstrate that, or they really do have a thought process like I quoted above, in which case they are crazy/stupid/emotionally stunted and to be avoided like the plague.
In short, call her and see how she’s doing and ask what she’s doing this weekend so you can hear all about inauguration day, you have nothing to lose but your agonised introspection.
I get my undies in a bunch about this stuff as well. If I call is that too forward? If I email is that too needy? Maybe I should be taking a hint here. Maybe she doesn’t think I’m really interested. What if there’s another guy?
In a way, I think it’s good that you’ve been incommunicado for a while. Reasonable, mentally healthy, mature people have lives apart from the romance they’re nurturing. You wouldn’t want to come across as clingy, nor would you want it from her. The first part of dating ought to be conveying to each other that you’re safe.
That said, I think you need to be yourself. If you’re the sort of person who likes to talk every couple of days, then call every couple of days.
Others have mentioned the three date thing…i.e. have sex or cut bait. Some subscribe to it; others don’t. If you want, why not suggest she meet you some place, i.e. you won’t be picking her up and therefore not dropping her off and inviting you in.
I wouldn’t count on the “ball is in her court” thing either. What if she accidentally deleted your message, or if the electronic gods conspired to kill it before it arrived, etc.? I like the idea that she hits the ball back, but maybe sometime it will be you who don’t get back to her for a couple days.
I think you should call. Don’t be rushed into making it too brief; if she’s up for talking, roll with it. I’d have a plan in mind, like, “Hey I’ve got tickets to…”
If she backs off or backs out, she may have intimacy issues. The sooner you find out, the better.
Good luck!
It sounds like to me (for what its worth) that she quite likes you but is also "trying out "another guy,she doesn’t want to blow you off just in case the other guy doesn’t work out but he’s the front runner at the moment.
No doubt I’m completely and utterly wrong and I’m being totally unfair about her character but I’m just giving an honest opinion of the vibe I’m getting.
Yeah, this.
I remember once I was seeing this girl. I left her a messege asking her to call me that night as I needed to know THAT NIGHT if I should buy tickets to a concert we discussed going to.
Well, she never called. So I rolled the diced bought the tickets anyway. Turns out she couldn’t go.
Her excuse for not calling me back that night is that she was busy with her kid. My dumbass was so in love with her I saw this as a perfectly plausible excuse.
One fucked up of of life is:
The one who cares less about a relationship; holds all the power.
I’m not sure, but your request might fall under the “we won’t close a thread just because the OP doesn’t like the responses” policy. If you regret starting the thread, just walk away from it. (IOW, I hope you don’t see this. ;))
Not for some of us, and especially not when we’re still trying to make a good impression.
Here’s my philosophy. When it comes to relationships, texting and email are for nerds, teenagers and pedophiles. Call her up. “Hey…what’s going on? I’m meeting a client near your office but do you want to grab coffee afterwards?” Then you can freakin text her when you’re in the neighborhood. Also, 3 hour phone conversations are bullshit too. Keep it short. Some light banter…blah blah blah…“hey listen, I got to get back to taking a shit [don’t say that] you want to do dinner Thurs? Good, pcick you up at 8”
I mean you can tell if someone’s interested in you. They enjoy spending time with you. They WANT you to contact them and ask them to do stuff together. If things are progressing super slowly or they aren’t responsive, they either:
-aren’t that into you
-are playing some stupid game
-stringing you along, probably with 4 other people
-they are so busy they have time to only speak to you once a week, which you probably don’t want anyway
I would send her one more e-mail.
“I miss you”
It’s not that I didn’t like the responses; it’s that I reconsidered what good could possibly come of having as subjective (and personal) a situation as this bandied about – since when it comes down to it, it’s really not the sort of thing you can give advice about from afar – and I realized that I wasn’t super-comfortable with opening up any more of my often ridiculously hyperanalytical thought process about the early stages of relationships to potentially public view. Especially given the likelihood that my further participation in the thread would probably result my sharing additional details about the situation in order to respond to inaccurate or ungrounded suppositions, questions, or comments, which I didn’t want to do either.
So instead I just decided that, since the thread wasn’t going to be closed, people could speculate to their hearts’ content and use my question as a general jumping-off point for their own views on relationship dynamics and what-have-you, and I simply wouldn’t contribute anything more of substance to the discussion. Which seems like a fair compromise, and one that’s perfectly within my rights to adhere to. Not that anyone’s saying that it isn’t. 
Suffice to say that different cohorts of different ages and locations and different types of experiences will have very different views about the way the world works or should work, relationship-wise, and if someone is coming at my question from a significantly different place than me, we’re going to be talking past each other to a large extent, and the situation I described in the OP is either going to be abstracted into uselessness or used to bolster perspectives with which I, based on my own experiences, my knowledge of myself, and my knowledge of the sort of women who I tend to like or who tend to like me, will simply disagree or find inapplicable.
God I hope your kidding because this is super creepy. Ugh.
:o
Blah blah blah, Gadarene – so what did you do, and what did she do?
Yeah, we need some closure here so we can move on with our lives! 
Sorry.
Was it something we said? Because we didn’t mean it! Something we did? We’ll stop. Something we should start doing…? 
But…but…I live vicariously through threads such as these/
Um…I just happened to be in IMHO and …uh…just wanted to see how it was going.
Just my take on the lady in question - “If I like somebody, I want to spend no time with them and never see them because anything else goes badly.” I’d keep shopping around. A good relationship really isn’t this hard - you want to see her, she wants to see you, you see each other, you have fun, it progresses.
Figured I’d give an update; I’m assuming it will be the last.
Thursday the 22nd I sent a breezy, short e-mail in the afternoon telling her that it was her turn in Scrabble and making oblique reference, with charm and subtlety, to the fact that I hadn’t heard from her in awhile. Twenty minutes later she takes her turn and writes back a four-paragraph e-mail that is, if not flirty or overly indicative of her interest level, definitely friendly and replete with stories and follow-up questions
The next morning, before I’ve responded, she e-mails again, sending a link to an article she thought I’d like and asking if I felt like doing something on Sunday. I reply that afternoon, saying I’m free other than a couple of hours of work I’m doing from home in the morning, and ask what she has in mind.
Haven’t heard from her by Saturday evening, so I text her to say that I’m planning on giving her a call around 7:30 to figure out our Sunday plans. She texts back agreeably. We talk by phone, and she suggests an art exhibition in the afternoon. I tell her I’m up for it, and then – because our original third date was going to be dinner at my place, and because she’d indicated in her “taking it slow” e-mail that she still wanted to do that the next time we got together – ask if she might want to do dinner as well, so I’d know to go shopping for necessary ingredients that morning. (Yes, it was a misstep. Yes, please to be cutting me a little bit of slack not to do and say everything perfectly.) She demurs, saying that it’s a possibility but that she doesn’t know whether or not she’ll be heading back home that night,* and suggests lunch beforehand.
So Sunday we have lunch, which is perfectly pleasant and fun, and we go to the exhibition, which is more of the same, except in hushed tones. And when we get out I ask if she’s up for anything else, and she says she has to pack to head back. So in the ninety seconds it takes for us to walk from the museum to the place she’s staying, I tell her to let me know when she wants to get together again, and she agrees to do so (although she says she’s in North Carolina this weekend) and provides vague affirmations about still wanting to see if we can make something special out of this. And we kiss goodbye, and that’s that.
And I hear nothing from her all week, although she makes a move in our Scrabble game on Wednesday. And Friday I send another breezy, short, funny e-mail – talking about a concert I’m going to on Saturday, hoping she has fun in North Carolina, and concluding with “drop me a line when you get a chance; I miss the e-mails.”
Not a thing since then, so I figure that pretty much does it for any remaining delusions I had about her interest level.
I’m not going to talk about my feelings here, or why this matters as much as it does, or why this sucks so much for me, nor am I going to try to justify (a) becoming invested in this and (b) trusting the sincerity of her expressed interest to begin with, especially since I’m sure that most people reading this post will have long since come to the conclusion that it’s just two dates and I need to get over it (or, alternatively, that I’m taking things too much to heart because sending me one e-mail in two and a half weeks might simply be her idea of taking it slow). I think those conclusions are wrong, and I have ample reasons for that, but it’s not something that I want to argue about, and it’s so read-dependent and experience-dependent that it’s not the kind of thing that an outside perspective is likely to be particularly valuable for.** So forgive me if I’m not planning on getting into a back-and-forth with anyone offering their views on the matter; I know people were curious how things turned out, so I just wanted to close the loop.
*Oh, right: she’s from D.C. and had spent five or six days a week staying with friends here during January, but while she’s taking post-bac classes this year (the second semester of which started on the 28th), she’s living in a town in Maryland an hour or so away. And yes, that makes logistics tough. But (a) it’s a credit to how much I turned out to like her and how well we get along that I’m comfortable with that, and (b) she’s the one who initiated contact with me to begin with, knowing I live in D.C., so presumably she’s been okay with the prospect of dealing with the distance, at least in theory, for longer than I have.
**Suffice to say that this one felt different enough, from the initial e-mails to the first date and onward, from the myriad failed or abortive relationships in my past that the apparent abrupt loss of interest is particularly inexplicable, and the implications of it particularly depressing.