The Space Between Pursuing and Being Pursued

I watched an older woman talk about dating women after splitting from her husband. She said one of the hardest parts was how unreadable women could be—how difficult it was to know whether someone was interested, merely being friendly, or still trying to understand her own feelings.

I felt ridiculously validated.

Not because women are uniquely confusing or dishonest. Men are plenty confusing, and everyone brings fear, history, and uncertainty into dating. Women also have legitimate reasons to be cautious. Dating creates emotional risks for all of us and additional physical and social risks for many women.

Still, traditional dating often places one person in the role of pursuer and allows the other to remain less clear. I have usually felt expected to be the pursuer. That means initiating, interpreting signals, risking rejection, and somehow moving things forward without moving too quickly. You are supposed to be confident but not presumptuous, persistent but not pushy, vulnerable but not desperate.

I have never been especially good at that dance.

To me, it seems like it should be simple:

“Hey, I like you. Do you want to go out?”

“Yes, I like you too.”

“Great. Let’s go out and see what happens.”

But people rarely arrive with that much clarity. We negotiate through glances, messages, likes, pauses, accidental intimacy, and conversations that may or may not mean what we hope they mean. Sometimes we don’t deliberately begin relationships at all. We just keep moving closer until one day we realize we have fallen into something.

Social media makes this even stranger. We can be extraordinarily visible without being genuinely available. Someone can read my most personal thoughts, know about my grief, understand my philosophy, and watch my life closely without ever actually stepping into it. A like might mean attraction, friendship, agreement, politeness, or nothing at all. We can feel exposed without becoming any more connected.

Dating apps are supposedly clearer because everyone is ostensibly there to meet someone. But they create their own ambiguity. We turn ourselves into profiles and make enormous judgments from a few photographs and sentences. There is always another theoretical possibility one swipe away. We may be putting ourselves out there, but we are often presenting a packaged approximation of ourselves rather than allowing someone to encounter us gradually.

I have tried to take the “just be yourself” route. The problem is that I can be completely myself at home—writing, making art, working on school, raising my son—and still be almost invisible to anyone new.

Being yourself is about authenticity. Putting yourself out there is about availability. Apparently, we need both.

I have been trying. I have hosted parties. I’m in school. I’ve gone to events. I’m preparing to sell my work at a market. These are real steps for me because going somewhere and allowing myself to be seen without controlling the outcome is not a small thing.

At one writing event, I was surrounded by attractive women, many of whom were probably too young for me anyway. I was already overwhelmed by another conflict happening around me, and my brain started trying to interpret the entire room at once. Who was safe? Who was available? Who was looking at me? What did that look mean? Was I behaving appropriately? Was I making anyone uncomfortable?

I sometimes judge the first look a woman gives me as if it contains a verdict.

One moment that especially scrambles my brain is when a woman looks at me and then glances down at her own chest. My eyes may instinctively follow the movement, and suddenly I become intensely self-conscious. I don’t want to ogle anyone. I want women to feel safe and respected around me. But I also appreciate beautiful bodies, experience sexual attraction, and am trying not to treat those ordinary parts of myself as evidence that I am secretly dangerous.

A brief glance is not the same as objectifying someone. Respect does not require the complete absence of attraction. Still, in the moment, my brain turns it into an ethical examination that I am terrified of failing.

The strangest contradiction is that I generally begin with the assumption that no woman is interested in me that way—and then examine every look for some indication of what she might be feeling. I dismiss the possibility of attraction while simultaneously becoming hyperaware of its smallest potential signals.

So perhaps I have been asking first looks to tell me something they cannot possibly tell me.

Maybe clearer information is found elsewhere: Does she continue the conversation? Does she remember things about me? Does she ever initiate? If I invite her to coffee, does she help make it happen? Does knowing her gradually create comfort, or does it produce endless confusion?

I’m beginning to see a difference between pursuit and invitation. Pursuit can become the exhausting attempt to create and sustain all the momentum myself. An invitation is one honest step that leaves room for the other person to take one too.

That sounds healthier. It also sounds terrifying.

Because ambiguity protects us. As long as I don’t ask, I cannot be directly rejected. As long as she doesn’t answer, she doesn’t have to expose herself either. We can both remain inside the safety of possibility, reading meaning into glances and messages without risking the clarity that could end the fantasy.

I don’t want to chase anyone. I don’t want to convince someone to choose me or become an expert at decoding women. I want clarity and reciprocity—but I also know that real people are often uncertain, and relationships do not begin according to clean rules.

Maybe putting myself out there means building a life in which I can be encountered, making small and honest invitations, and then watching for mutual movement.

Or maybe that is simply another way of trying to make an inherently confusing thing feel manageable.

I honestly don’t know yet.