Hey dudes –

As mentioned in the FR I just posted, I'm working on taking things in a more clearly sexual/romantic direction instead of just being the "entertainer guy," as I often fall into. A lot of this comes down to taking initiative physically, so on the day 2 I had this afternoon (the hipster-ish girl from this FR), I wanted to get physical early and often. And it was a total success.

As an experiment, I'm going to cut out verbal element entirely and just describe the physical interactions.

We're planning to have a lunch picnic at a park, and we meet outside a nearby subway station. I walk up, give her a hug – physical right from the get-go – and we start walking. As we cross the first street, I take her hand in mine.

And here's the thing – she didn't resist, but she didn't encourage me either. She didn't squeeze, or look at me and smile. A year ago, I would've gotten super anxious about this, thinking, "OMG, she doesn't like this, I need to stop," and the date would become awkward or at least platonic after that.

But I don't let it get to me (well, not much). We walk all the way to the park hand in hand.

At the park, we sit a little ways apart – intentionally, to give her a little space after the hand holding. Fifteen minutes in though, I steal a short kiss, continue talking, and a few minutes later scoot closer to her, my legs on the grass behind her back, sort of perpendicular to each other; it feels close but not overly cuddling or PDA-y (try it sometime). From here I go for a few more kisses, longer ones this time.

Again, she's not giving me much help here. She's not stopping me, or frowning, but she's not smiling or pulling me in. I am determined to keep going though, until she either resists or lets me touch her silk igloo, lol. So I stand us up, and we walk around the park a bit more. I offer my arm, with full belief (OK, actually 98 percent belief) that she'll take it, and she does.

To my surprise, given all this lack of clear positive response, she comes to my house without protest. We kiss a bit on the porch (it's daylight though, and I have housemates, so we keep it PG). It's only here that she makes her first positive signal of interest – leaning towards me for a moment when I lean back from the kiss.

"OK," I think to myself, "maybe this really is on after all."

I take her up to my room. We kiss. Maybe I'm selling myself short, but I'm still thinking in the back of my head, "Is this really happening? Surely she's going to say 'stop' at any moment." But I pull her to the bed anyway, and the clothes start coming off.

So the moral is that getting physical works, and a lack of positive response doesn't necessarily mean a negative response. There's some truth to the saying, "If she's still talking to you, she likes you." To put it better, you may safely assume she likes you until proven otherwise. Thinking "She's not squeezing my hand, she doesn't like me!" is completely backwards; you should be thinking, "She hasn't taken her hand away, she likes me!"

I should mention though: I did run into resistance eventually. It turned out that she didn't actually want to play hide-the-salami today, and I had to "settle" for other forms of naked happiness. And on a sidenote, maybe there's some connection between her passiveness earlier and her p-in-v LMR later. [Edit: See discussion with Tradman and frogma below about LMR.]

But I felt fucking pleased with the outcome, and my point still stands: you shouldn't doubt yourself just because the girl doesn't smile at you immediately when you escalate. Maybe she's into it but not expressing it, or maybe she's not sure if she's into it. But if she's not into it, she'll express it, so you don't need overanalyze it.