Somewhere in the last decade, dating culture decided that the signs a man likes you would all be very dramatic. He would move a strand of hair from your face. He would tell his friends. He would drive an hour in the wrong direction. He would say it, unprompted, at brunch. If none of that was happening, you were meant to conclude, with a firmness bordering on the medical, that he didn’t like you.
The trouble with this list is that it describes courtship as it appears in a film, and men are not, on the whole, in a film. Most of them cannot manage grand. Most of them can, however, manage small, and small is where the truth lives.
I have been thinking about this a great deal lately, because a friend of mine kept asking whether a particular man liked her, and every time she asked I could see about six things he was doing that told her he did, and every time I named them she waved them away as too subtle to count. This is the trouble. We have been told the real signs are the loud ones. They aren’t. They are the eight below, and none of them require him to say a word.
1. He remembers something you didn’t think he was listening to.
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You mentioned in passing on a Tuesday that your mother was having a small procedure on Friday. On Friday evening he asks how she is. That was not remembering, in the modern sense of scrolling back through a text to check. That was carrying you around in his head for four days. Men who are not interested do not carry women around. The energy required is prohibitive. When a man reproduces, without prompting, a detail you barely noticed telling him, you are being told something quite important, and he does not know he is telling you.
2. He puts his phone away.
Not face down on the table. Actually away. In a bag, in a jacket, in another room. This is the smallest gesture on the list and one of the most reliable. A man who is uncertain about you will keep his phone accessible, because part of him is still available to other conversations. A man who has decided about you removes the temptation of everyone else from the physical space you are sharing. It is a quiet act of monogamy, made before either of you has had the exclusivity conversation, and it is very hard to fake because it costs him something he doesn’t want to give up.
3. He picks up the phone.
Modern dating happens almost entirely in writing, and men who are lukewarm about a woman have every reason to keep it that way. Text is efficient, deniable, editable, and safe. The voice call, especially for anything longer than a piece of logistics, is a real investment of a man’s evening, and men do not tend to invest their evenings casually. If he is ringing you rather than typing, if the calls have grown longer over the weeks, if he is the one suggesting you move a conversation to the phone, that is one of the clearer signals available to you in the current dating environment. Most men will spend a year in a text thread before they call a woman they are only mildly interested in.
4. He tries to make you laugh, and it’s not really his thing.
Watch for the man who is not usually the joker and starts telling you small, slightly awkward jokes. They will land inconsistently. He will look mildly worried when they don’t. This awkwardness is the tell. Men who are practiced at humour deploy it in every conversation; men who are trying at humour are trying it on for a specific person. He wants to see you laugh. He is not entirely sure how. The attempt itself is the affection, and it is much harder to counterfeit than the polished version.
5. He introduces you to something he loves.
A song he wants you to hear. A restaurant that means something to him. The particular route he takes on his morning walk. Men are surprisingly private about the small things that make up their inner geography, and they do not open those doors casually. When he starts showing you his taste, in the specific and slightly self-conscious way one shows a new person a favourite thing, he is enlarging his sense of himself to include you. This is different from telling you about his interests. Anyone can list their interests. He is handing you a key.
6. He remembers what you don’t like.
More telling than remembering what you do. He knows not to bring up the ex you mentioned once. He orders around your allergy without making a moment of it. He steers the conversation away from a topic he saw upset you three weeks ago. This is attention deployed in the protective register, and it is rare. Men who are half-interested will occasionally recall your favourite drink. Men who are seriously interested learn where you are tender and take small, unshowy care not to press on those places.
7. He shows up on days he doesn’t have to.
The Wednesday text with no plan attached. The stop by your building on a route that was not really on his route. The message on the morning of your presentation, when you had not asked him to remember. These are not big moments. They are the opposite. They are the small choices to include you in his ordinary day, when nothing was scheduled and nothing was expected. A man will only do this for a woman he has decided about, because ordinary days are the scarce resource, and he is spending one on you.
8. He lets himself be uncool.
He sings, badly. He wears the item you gently teased him about, on purpose. He tries the food he told you last month he would never eat. He goes to the museum. He asks you what a song means. Whatever version of composed he has built for the world, he lowers a small piece of it in front of you, and does not seem to mind that he does. Being willing to be uncool with a specific person is one of the truer signs of love in disguise, and it is almost impossible to fake, because the whole point is that he is not thinking about how he looks. He is thinking about being with you.
What to do with any of this
The trouble with this list is that once you have it, you will be tempted to audit every man in your life against it, which is not what the list is for. The list is not for building a case. It is for noticing.
If a man is doing four or five of these, he almost certainly likes you, whether or not he has arrived at the words yet. You do not have to force him to arrive at the words on your timeline. You do have to give him the room to. Text will not give him the room. Text lets both of you off the hook and lets the whole thing drift for a season while he considers, on his own, in silence.
Move it to voice. Not with an announcement. Just call him one evening. Or answer the next time he calls. If you have not had a real, unhurried voice conversation with a man in a while, and the very idea of it feels strange, the muscle can be rebuilt in a week. A long call with your sister, the walk home spent on the phone with an old friend, an hour on a chat line trial when you simply want to remember what a warm stranger’s voice sounds like. Then, when the man in question rings, you will hear all eight signs land in real time, in real breath, and you will not need a list to know.
The signs have been there. He has been telling you. He has just been telling you at a volume dating culture has trained you to miss.
The remedy is old-fashioned and short. Turn the volume up. Answer the phone. Hear him breathe. My friend, incidentally, who spent months asking me whether her man liked her, is engaged now. She figured it out on a two-hour call one Sunday afternoon, having spent the previous evening on a long walk and an hour on a Latino chat line because she wanted to be in a warm listening mood before he rang. He rang. She heard him.
Consider your ears returned to you.
