I Finally Stopped Asking “Does He Like Me?” — And Started Asking “Do I Like Him?” It Changed Everything

I asked him for a ride home. It was late, the wedding was winding down, and Uber’s surge pricing had turned a ten-minute journey into an extortionate sum I wasn’t willing to pay. He had been avoiding me all night. At one point, he physically stopped someone from leaving us alone together.

He told me to give him a moment. A few minutes later, when he thought I wasn’t looking, I watched him run out of the venue. That was when it became clear.

For most of my life, I have been preoccupied with whether the men I was interested in liked me. That question shaped everything. It made me attentive, accommodating, and at times, anxious. I learned how to present myself in ways that felt appealing, how to read signals, and how to adjust in order to be chosen. What I hadn’t learned was how to ask a much simpler question: Do I like him?

Women are not taught to centre their own desire. In dating, being chosen is often framed as the reward. We are taught to interpret male interest as validation, and to treat that validation as something meaningful. The result is that our attention is directed outward. We learn to assess how we’re being perceived, rather than how we actually feel.

By the time I met a man I truly liked, that pattern was still intact. We were introduced through mutual friends, and the connection felt easy. There was alignment across everything, from intellect to faith. What drew me in most was his ability to hold nuance. As a Christian woman, I had struggled to meet men who didn’t carry rigid, often harmful views of women while still claiming values like kindness, love, and patience. He seemed different, and more importantly, capable.

So I responded in the way I always had. I paid attention to whether he liked me. I analysed his behaviour, waited for signs of interest, and adjusted myself accordingly. The question of whether I liked him wasn’t something I thought to interrogate.

That changed during a conversation at Christmas. He told me he had chosen women out of duty before, not because he genuinely liked them. They were “good girls,” he said, but he felt nothing. He told me it was different with me, although he could not explain how.

I had spent years in therapy, and enough time dating to recognise patterns when I saw them. What he described was not a one-off. It was a pattern, and without a real commitment to change, it wasn’t going to shift.

I could see where it came from: a history of emotional neglect, shaped further by social and cultural conditioning. But understanding it didn’t change the outcome. I knew I would not be the one to fix it. Women are often expected to take on the emotional labour in relationships. Though invisible, it’s a constant burden that easily leads to exhaustion and resentment.

This labour can look like translating someone’s behaviour back to them in gentler terms, softening your own disappointment so they don’t feel criticised, asking the right questions in the right tone so that they might begin to understand themselves. It is, in many ways, the work of building a bridge between who someone is and who they might become, then waiting there while they decide whether to cross.

For a long time, I believed that was part of the connection. This time, I didn’t.

As bell hooks writes in The Will to Change, many men are socialised away from their emotional lives, taught to suppress or fear their feelings altogether. I felt the pull to stay and understand, but I also recognised what that would require of me, and that recognition allowed me to cut contact.

Seven months later, we again found ourselves at the same wedding. I felt a flicker of nerves when I saw him. We had spoken briefly a few months earlier, and he had told me he still really liked me, that I didn’t understand the depth of his feelings.

As he approached me to say hello, he seemed uncomfortable, and as the evening unfolded, the same pattern became clear. He kept his distance, avoided direct interaction, and found ways to maintain space between us.

And at the end of the night, when I asked for a ride home, he left. Watching him walk away, I realised something with a new clarity. I had liked him fully, and more than I had liked anyone before. But liking someone isn’t enough to build anything real.

For a long time, I had mistaken proximity for connection and attraction for compatibility. When you are not centred in your own experience, it’s easy to overlook that. You make allowances. You fill the gaps with someone’s potential. And slowly, you lose your ability to trust yourself.

Unlearning that isn’t immediate. It happens in small moments, in decisions where you choose to pay attention to your own discomfort instead of explaining it away. For me, it started with a different question: Do I actually like him? Not the idea of him, or who he might become, but who he is in front of me.

Once I started asking that question, everything else followed. I noticed how he spoke, how he listened, how he responded to discomfort, how he treated other people, and how he made me feel. Those details became impossible to ignore.

Slowly, I stopped confusing attention with care and proximity with closeness. My friendships became the reference point. The care, curiosity, and emotional safety I expect there is now what I expect in romantic relationships.

Choosing myself didn’t look dramatic. It looked like trusting my own responses, even when they went against how I had been taught to think about love.

I don’t know if I will meet someone I genuinely like who can also meet me fully, but I do know this: Being chosen is no longer enough.