“I Confused the Relief With the Feeling”: When Early Confessions Are Actually Tests

My friend Maya sat across from me at a bar in Brooklyn sometime last fall. The mezcal in front of her had gone flat, the ice mostly melted, and she kept pushing the straw around like she was trying to figure out something else entirely. She'd been home maybe an hour. A few dates in with a man from Hinge. A photographer. Owned a place in Bed-Stuy. Carried a Murakami paperback around like a credential.

"He told me he's falling in love with me," she said. She was looking at the table. I could see her finger tracing the same scratch in the wood over and over.

I waited. There's a specific skill to not saying anything when a friend is mid-collapse. I wasn't going to be the one to tell her what it meant.

"I just said thank you." She let out this small embarrassed laugh. "What do you even say thank you for?"

I didn't have an answer. I'd been on the receiving end of that exact sentence more than once. I'd also said thank you.

She wasn't being paranoid. She was paying attention.

There's a choreography to early courtship that almost every woman learns.

A man you've known for, what, a few weeks. A few dinners. A weekend with his college friends where she felt like an accessory to inside jokes. A handful of late-night FaceTimes where he describes his mother's drinking in a tone that's almost rehearsed. Then he looks at you across a small table and says something enormous. I really like you. I've fallen for you. What do you think of me?

Someone finally says the scary thing and your whole chest unclenches and you mistake that for the feeling.

Maya was trying to figure out which one it was. Or, and this is the part that kept her up, I think, she was trying to figure out if he'd already figured it out.

Because that's what those early confessions usually are. Not confessions. Audits.

The man who says it first isn't braver. He's running the numbers.

By the time a man asks what do you think of me, casually, over a shared appetizer, like he's asking you to pass the salt, something has usually already shifted. You've met his friends. He keeps a hoodie at your place. He's stopped swiping. Or he says he has.

I was peeling the label off a beer bottle in long strips the first time a man asked me this, and he was watching me do it, and I remember thinking: he is not actually curious what I think of him. He is watching to see what my face does while I decide.

I've watched men rank their dating options based on responses to this exact question. Not privately. Out loud. At brunch. To other men. As if it were the weather.

He's measuring me. I can feel him doing it.

Being on the receiving end of a premature I love you feels less like a gift and more like getting cornered in a hallway.

I keep a journal entry from that time; the page is stained. I was drinking red wine and writing about a man I'm not going to name. The pen had no cap. I was holding it between my teeth. He'd said it two days earlier and I'd said it back because I didn't know what else to do with it. The wine bled through the page onto the kitchen counter. I let it. I sat there long enough for the stain to dry dark.

There's a piece of paper I wish I could have handed my twenty-six-year-old self.

When a man tells you something enormous too early, your job is not to figure out how you feel about what he said. Your job is to notice when he said it. The timing tells you more than the words do.

A man who waits six months is, I think, actually scared. A man who tells you at six weeks might not be scared at all. Or maybe he is. I don't know. That's the whole problem, probably.

If you're the woman sitting across from someone who just said the big thing too soon, and you can feel yourself wanting to say it back because the relief is so intense, I know that feeling. I've folded every single time. The relief is not the same thing as the feeling. I know this. I've gotten them confused anyway.

If a man says it early and means it, does it matter that the words came too soon? I don't know. I'm tired of having to decide in real time.

I don't know. I have friends who'd call me a coward for not saying the brave thing back. Other friends would call me a fool for even considering it. They're both right, probably.

The next time a man tells me he's fallen for me, I try to notice one thing before I figure out what to say back. I don't always succeed. Sometimes the relief wins.

Did he say it because he couldn't help himself?

I have a stack of conversations I'm still replaying later than I want to admit. A couple of years I'm not getting back. I have a best friend who finally stopped saying thank you and just started saying I need more time, and she's doing better than I am.

The phone lights up on the counter. I keep not picking it up.