Dating and Relationships: Is there a way I can get him to tell me how he feels about me and what he wants without directly asking that question or seeming needy or pushy?

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This is the kind of question I love on Quora. Every time someone asks a question asking for insight into their situation, the “how could we know, just ask him!” horde descends down and shouts the same thing.

Then when they ask just how one does that, what is that I hear? Crickets. Or even better: “no you can’t do that.”

Because you’re right, to much language spilled around feelings makes people seem at best needy, at worst pushy.

Your answer is to look at the little things. Someone did this study a few years ago that purported to predict whether couples were going to stay together or not. Their methodology was to look for micro-indications of certain emotions. They found that the biggest predictor of couples splitting up is contempt. They’d count dozens of little contemptful reactions in one or both of the participants. In some cases, they were putting each other down in every sentence, whereas indicators of love or happiness were practically nonexistent.

If you look at the aggregate of a person’s words, tone, body language, it paints a clear picture of how that person feels about you. The trick is you have to look at that person interacting at you the same way you would look at that person interacting with someone else.

Most of us aren’t really capable of doing that. We get triggered by something they said or did, and when we get triggered, our reactions say more about us than it does about them. The way I see most people interacting, it’s like neither of them really know the other person at all, and don’t interact with them, rather with some caricature. Of course they’re going to have trouble figuring out whether a guy or girl likes them or not. They’re too busy talking and don’t ever listen.

Start really listening to what someone says to you. Stop reacting so much and pay attention to tone, mood, body language. That’s how you find out how a person feels. It will be literally written all over their faces.