It looked like romance. That was the problem.
At first, I thought I had found an unusually good match on a dating app.
I’ll call him ‘The Experience Guy’. You’ll know why soon.
He was intelligent, well-travelled, and obsessed with all kinds of film cameras. He had studied abroad and seemed to have the sort of restless curiosity that made one subject naturally spill into another. We could go from AI to astrology to literature to films to comparing our travel lists without ever having to force the next conversation.
It was the opposite of the usual dating app chats, where two strangers exchange increasingly tedious versions of “what do you do?” until one of them quietly disappears.
With him, there was always somewhere else to go.
He was quick with his replies. Consistent. He remembered things I said. He asked questions. He had opinions. And he liked hearing mine.
There was chemistry. There was curiosity. There was effort.
And then there was his philosophy of dating.
He was in Mumbai. I in Delhi.
He wanted to spend the month getting to know me.
“How does this dating model actually work?” I asked.
“Investing considerable time getting to know someone without seeing them happens to be my favourite hobby,” he said.
Revolutionary in today’s times. Or so I thought.
He told me about a woman he’d previously connected with a few months ago. He had flown to Bangalore to meet her. It hadn’t worked out, but “it had been fun”.
At the time, I filed that under romantic. A man willing to get on a plane for a woman he liked? In this economy?
Very soon, I was the woman he was planning to see during a Delhi trip next month.
There was attraction. This was not subtle. There was anticipation around the meeting. He made that quite clear.
I thought I was being pursued as a person who was also desired.
That distinction would later become important.
Because before he was due to come to Delhi, I told him something that, in retrospect, was simple: “I don’t do casual hookups.”
But the transformation after was 180.
The man who had spent weeks building an intense connection was suddenly out of the race, leaving behind some life lessons for me. “Never settle” for a man who expects anything from you, he said. One day, “someone” would make me feel safe. And then with a “platonic” pivot, he bowed out.
It was a fascinating genre change. Three hours earlier, the conversation had been unmistakably sexual. Once an immediate encounter was off the table, he suddenly became deeply concerned about protecting me.
And then an impressive number of compatibility issues followed in his message.
His future move to the US. His unwillingness to do intercontinental relationships (intercity was apparently fine!). His worry about “wasting my time” and “disappointing me”. His philosophy that he believed in “dating for the experience rather than the outcome”. A slight but clever deviation from the otherwise overly used dating mantra—’Going with the flow’.
None inherently unreasonable. But all remarkably punctual.
‘The Experience Guy’ had apparently discovered the seriousness of his impending US move at exactly the same time I discovered that I was allowed to say not yet.
And that left me with a question that was bigger than one man.
Are we still interested in people, or simply in the fleeting ‘experiences’ they can offer us?
The modern sexual pursuer
This is where modern dating gets interesting. The obvious sexual pursuer is easy to identify. He walks up to you in a club. He tells you you’re attractive. He makes his intentions known. There is an ask. You can say yes or no.
Strangely, that is honest.
The more interesting character is the performative sexual pursuer.
He doesn’t simply proposition you. He creates a story.
He asks about your life. He spends all day talking. He learns how your mind works. He builds ‘banter’. He makes plans. He crosses cities.
He doesn’t just pursue sex. He creates an experience in which sex feels like the natural conclusion of being pursued. Only to discover that what he wanted was the ‘experience’, not the relationship that might follow it.
And that is precisely what makes him difficult to read.
The bait and switch
When it comes to ‘The Experience Guy’, this was not a man whose interest I had to decode. There were no games. He was a conversationalist. An excellent one.
He told me he didn’t date in his own city. For reasons he never really explained. At one point, I joked that he should fly to a different city for every date and document the whole thing. It could blow up on Instagram!
He said, “Too late, some guy in the US had already done it.”
A discussion about pink became a joke about Margot Robbie, then Wuthering Heights, then gothic romance. A complaint turned into banter as we sparred over Twilight vs LOTR and which was the more defining series in the fantasy genre.
Even disagreement became flirtation.
When I teased him about other ‘matches’ keeping him up all night, he corrected me:
Then a joke about my office timings:
But alongside all of that was conversation. Real conversation.
Childhood stories, friends’ weddings, dating mistakes, and patterns of self sabotage. And also a Bonnie and Clyde fantasy. Classic.
There was a recurring joke, however, less romantic and more revealing: the ‘rug’.
Whenever his flirting edged too far, I’d joke about burying it under the rug. It became a word for moments neither of us quite wanted to address.
He was also curious about how I saw him in those moments. Once, after I chided him:
Then another statement:
And so I evaded it.
But eventually, the subtext stopped behaving like subtext. The first meeting began acquiring a rather clear vocabulary for him.
There would be drinks. Eventually, somewhere private. And then the conversation shifted tone.
“When we do meet in person and eventually make it to a place where we’re alone…”
THAT sentence kept going. And going. And going.
And it hit me: I wasn’t simply the woman he was travelling to meet. I was the experience he was travelling for. And his itinerary came with a very specific set of expectations.
So I lifted the ‘rug’. And the rest is history.
The man who wants the journey… and the destination
We live in a dating culture where sex is easier to access than ever. The modern sexual pursuer doesn’t necessarily look like a man looking for a hookup. Sometimes he looks like a man looking for you.
The effort may be real. The attraction may be real. The conversation may be real.
And sex may still be the destination, giving the journey most of its fuel.
That is the strange evolution of sexual pursuit in the age of dating apps. A match can easily end in a hookup without the months of courtship.
So why would a man with no shortage of potential hookups in his own city spend weeks pursuing a woman in another?
What has made sex more accessible while making the performance of pursuing it more elaborate?
Perhaps it is simple male biological wiring. In times when access is easy and abundant, the chase becomes the challenge and reward.
But the distinction between courtship and sexual pursuit has become difficult to make for those seeking genuine connections. I realised, however, there is ONE question that can make it surprisingly revealing.
Not: “Does he want me?”
That part is usually obvious.
Not even: “Does he like me?”
He might.
The more revealing question is: Does pursuit survive when he has to wait?
Because the modern sexual pursuer doesn’t necessarily fake the journey. He may simply be taking the journey because he wants the destination.
As for ‘The Experience Guy’, he didn’t become cruel when I asked to slow down. He became something almost disorienting. His exit arrived wrapped in ‘White Knight’ behaviour.
Maybe I was lucky in that matter. Many women may not share the same story after saying no to a man.
But yet, beneath all that lovely language, he was no longer willing to hop on that plane.
Subsequent communication went unanswered.
Perhaps that is the real challenge of modern dating.
We have become extraordinarily good at pursuing desire. We’re less certain about how to recognise connection.
And sometimes, the only way to find out is to make him wait.
(Note: This is the author’s first-person account. Locations and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.)