Why do so many people answer the question, "How can I tell if this girl likes me?" with “Ask her out!” when getting to know her first is better?

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I’ve wrestled with this one. The main problem I see with dates is they can be incredibly hard to coordinate. If you don’t yet know whether you like someone, how are you going to decide whether to go on a date with them? The last thing I or anyone else wants is to be stuck with someone and have it go nowhere. Sure, if it happens once, fine, write it off as a bad experience.

But for me dating is a long hard slog. You spend time putting yourself out there, you spend time building as much of a connection as you can in the very short time you have to do so, you get their number, coordinate a date. By the time all that happens, you’ve sunk a lot of time and energy into this one little hour you’re spending together.

If the date goes bad, and you don’t get another one, it’s not just that time you spent on the date that you lost. I just can’t afford to have bad dates. I’d rather spend the time at the bar or hanging out with friends.

So as a result I’ve mostly stopped interacting with girls when I can’t get to know them well enough to know if I want to spend the time trying to date them. I started gravitating towards women I already knew pretty well. It severely limits my dating pool and forces me to be way more patient than I used to have to be. But as a result I never feel like I’m wasting my time and it turns out that for me that’s the more important consideration. The frustration of dating isn’t worth the payoff for me.

If the goal is simply to find someone, then you need to start paying more attention to the signals women put out. I notice signals all the time from women. I don’t follow up on them most of the time because I want to date the women I have crushes on, not women that have crushes on me. If they want to ask me out, I’ll consider it, but for the aforementioned coordination problems I constantly have trying to date in Atlanta, I’m not going to put a ton of work into dating someone just off of a signal.

There was this gorgeous girl I knew from the grocery store that, after perhaps six months of flirting, I finally asked out. I gave her my number, she never called. Took a few weeks to get her number, when I called she wouldn’t pick up or return. We’d talk about it the next time I saw her and I’d realize she was just really busy or whatever not that she wasn’t attracted to me. Young attractive women have really crazy lives and you just have to put up with it if you want to date them. You get a tiny slice of their time and if you can’t elbow your way in to get more of it, they’re not going to do it for you.

I just gave up after awhile. We still see each other once a month or so and flirt as much as we ever did. I know better now than to try to make more of it.