A few years ago I started hearing a new kind of jargon from people seeking romantic guidance, “What are his / her intentions?”
When I first started hearing it, it seemed like a weird question. After all, relationships are organic, flowing and dynamic and people rarely have fixed “intentions,” exact blueprints or robotic instructions of what they want and how they wish to proceed. Nope. Most people (just like you) are trying to understand another person, decide how they fit in their lives and protect their heart from hurt in the process.
I quickly tuned into the fact that what people really wanted to know was whether or not the person they were seeing was interested the same kind of relationship they were. Does he want a relationship? Is she interested in me the same way I am? And while this might have been a more obvious process a few decades ago (don’t people talk openly anymore?) modern dating has made figuring out how another person feels a more complicated and confusing process as dating (and social technology and social media) changes the relationship landscape.