How To Tell If A Guy Likes You Or Really Just Wants A Relationship

It was Saturday. Dinnertime was over. He was a friend of a friend. I was bored.

To be honest with you, I didn't want a relationship at the time, but I'd agreed to go on a "blind" date with this guy because my friend had shown me a picture of him and, well, he looked pretty darn cute. He had dimples and a smile to die for. Why pass up a guy with dimples?

We decided to meet each other at a bar tucked away in Manhattan's West Village. Two drinks into our date, he got me to laugh and it takes a lot for me to laugh. Seeing him again was a no-brainer.

For our second date, he took me to dinner. He told me over Mexican food that three months prior, he had broken up with his ex-girlfriend of two years.

There was one moment while gobbling down those cupcakes that changed everything for me. "Watch me smear frosting all over myself," he said. He did. And then, he smeared some onto my face. I'm assuming it was because he was feeling all cutesy, but I just wasn't feeling it.

He took me to the park by my apartment afterwards, and it was there where we climbed up onto a rock and laid under the stars. My head rested on his arm. The whole thing was so serious. Serious and... orchestrated.

Friends, hear me when I say there was literally nothing wrong with this guy and I mean nothing, except for the fact that he had three cats (and you can't trust a man who has cats). But he was handsome -- strikingly handsome. I'm talking chiseled jawline, big, brown eyes and a football player-like stature.

He was an Ivy League alum. He came from a good family and had no criminal record (that I knew of, anyway). If anything, he was just a little too perfect for misfit Sheena.

I'm the kind of girl who doesn't try to make something more than it really is.

So when he followed up with me for a third date, I pulled a classic fuckgirl move. I told him I'm emotionally unavailable (which is true, although I suppose that'd change for the right person). And that was that; I didn't hear from him or speak to him again.

But then a month and a half passed. One day, I was sitting in bed, coffee in hand, scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed when, lo and behold, there he was, hand-in-hand with another girl. They were standing together in front of a museum doing some couple-y looking stuff and it looked like she had already met the parents -- well, at least one -- because the caption read, "Thanks, Dad," which means his dad must've taken the picture. 

The evidence was compelling; the last guy I dated was now in a serious relationship with someone else and there was no disputing it.

Already? But it had only been a matter of weeks since our last date. Hmmm. This guy seemed to be jumping from one girlfriend to the next faster than Taylor Swift goes through boyfriends, and something clicked in my mind: Only a "relationship guy" would act in such a way.

And all of a sudden, everything made sense. Like the cupcake thing and the park thing. See, there was no conversational spark that warranted a cupcake smear. The gestures kind of just came out of nowhere, and they didn't feel natural. They felt... unnatural. Rehearsed, almost. It was the sort of thing you see the love interest do to his lady love in a movie because it's considered conventionally romantic.

Mr. Perfect was a "relationship guy," and I could smell it from the moment he walked through the door on our very first date.

They say everything happens for a reason, and I'm pretty sure it's a blessing in disguise that we didn't work out. Because he never really liked me. He just liked the idea of me. He was a serial boyfriend, a relationship hopper, the kind of guy who pulled out corny moves for girls who might not even be into corny.

I'm the kind of girl who doesn't try to make something more than it really is. The kind who needs more than three months to get over a two-year relationship.

The kind who knows exactly what she wants and won't stop looking until she finds it.