Funny, we have all these relationship experts contributing to our site that can build you up and knock your relationship issues down with the quickness. Yet and still,  I would rather pose the question, the one mentioned in the title above, to you–our faithful readers.

If you ask me, I would say, probably about two to three dates works fine for me to figure out what I’m thinking about a guy: if I like him, or if I would rather forget him. If you ask my mother, well, you need to give these things time. Time? I don’t know about anybody else, but I work a demanding job (that I love, don’t get it twisted) and so at the end of the day, my time isn’t something I’m really feeling like wasting on any ‘ol body. But my mother says she wasn’t necessarily a fan of my father when they first met (when I asked if she liked him she made that noise that kind of says, “HELL NO”), and it took a while for her to warm up to him–a good number of dates.

They’ve been married more than 25 years now. Hmmm. I could have this whole dating thing wrong if they’re still strong after all these years and went through a string of less than memorable dates to get to this point.

So let me breakdown my situation: I guess you could say I’ve been seeing a guy for about a month now. We’re not booed up, just going on a few dates, talking back and forth–the usual. In fact, we’re far from being “booed up.” In reality, I’m reluctantly keeping this thing going. A few weeks ago, the young man, who is nice and pretty cute, told me he liked me, and that he wanted to see more of me. MORE? Hell, I was struggling to get to our dates on time. I was honest with him (after he revealed his feelings to me) in the fact that I didn’t think we were compatible. Why? We had been spending too much time talking about him during our dates, and not talking about anything with depth any other time we would talk. His messages weren’t met with excitement by me, but by a long breath-y sigh. And after he gave me inaccurate directions to one of our date spots and then tried to play victim when I looked frustrated, I was pretty much as snarl-faced as I could get.  After I told him the “real deal, ” he played it cool, and I was home free.

But when I broke this down to my mother, she made me feel bad ya’ll. She said to me that you might not necessarily “like” someone just from sitting and eating dinner with them a couple of times–you don’t really know them yet. I was pretty much told that I could be missing out on something good. (*sigh*)

Like something out of a movie, although I told him I wasn’t interested before, he contacted me a couple of days after I talked to my mom just to see how I had been. One thing led to another (get your mind out of the gutter) and we’re supposed to meet up again soon. Yay. So I’ve “kind of” taken her advice and decided to try and be more open about him. But could she be wrong? She might be, because we started chatting again about three weeks ago, and I STILL haven’t met up with him since. Here’s why:

I think in a world where people are working multiple jobs, have major responsibilities and get about half of the designated eight hours of sleep every night, time is for sure, of the essence. So that’s why I’m having second thoughts about my situation. I personally think that you don’t have to feel butterflies in your stomach, or need to break out in Tears for Fears’ “I Choose You” when you think about a new guy you’re dating. I get that. But if you, like me, would rather kick it with friends or sit in the house with a comfy heated blanket and marvel at old The Wire episodes as opposed to sitting in a bar with a guy you truly aren’t in to like that, then that should be a sign. I would have no qualms with spending hours chatting over drinks with a guy I was excited about, but if not, then I’d rather keep those hours. I might give this guy one more date, but after that, I can’t do any more if I’m still not feeling anything. A sistah doesn’t have to feel like “Oh Happy Day!” about a guy up front, but I should be feeling something. Right? Why waste my time and his?

So I ask again, in this big ‘ol dating world with prospects all around (not necessarily the greatest of prospects though), how many dates does it take for you to figure out if you want to keep seeing a guy? If he’s worth the time?

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