Dear Oceandrive24:

You shared that you are a single mum of two teenagers. You home-educate your 15 year old son and are otherwise very busy with him because he has autism, OCD, social anxiety and sensory difficulties. In the last six months you’ve been chatting with a man occasionally. Three weeks ago, you started going for walks with him and he expressed that he wanted to date you. You explained to him how busy you are with your son, and “asked to take things slowly and see how it goes be that friendship or maybe something more”.

On New Year’s Day, you told him that you are very busy with your son, and therefore, all you can offer him was friendship. He told you that he understood and was happy to be friends with you. You realize that you want more with him, and you think that you may have been unfair to him for having “unintentionally decided for him if he wanted to date” you, instead of “allowing him to decide for himself… Maybe it would have been better to have given him the gift of making his own choice with all the information”.

My comment: A decision on whether to have a relationship between two people needs to be made by the two individuals, not by one. If you give him all the information and let him make the decision for you- you are giving your power away.

You asked: “Is it wrong of me to have offered him friendship knowing that deep down I would like to have been able to become more?”- I don’t think it’s wrong of you. I suggest that you have a conversation with him (or a series of conversations): tell him that you have an interest in him as more than a friend, share with him all the information about your life that you want to share, and have him share with you about his life: what occupies his time outside work, what is his social life like, etc.- get to know each other and figure out together what kind of a relationship you would like to have.

anita