How can anyone not privy to the emotions of the two people involved have any way of knowing?

By using their own experience to read “the signs and portents”?

It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask, even a state of mind to be in, if you’re an adolescent just starting out on a relationship.
I’d have thought the vast majority of folks experienced similar feelings when they were of that age. It’s all part of the education that burgeoning relationships at a tender age can bring.

If you are 12, it is a reasonable question . . . probably why I find these questions so annoying on a 13 and over site . . .

It does not seem to be something that people beyond adolescence would be obsessing over enough to ask others.

There may be indicators, but one doesn’t really know until the interested party declares himself or herself.

Meanwhile, the speculation is only good for pleasant daydreaming.

It is and is not a dumb question. What makes it dumb is the way it is written—so imprecisely. It is an unanswerable question. However, if you add certain details, it then becomes clear why there might be confusion. What we really need in the title is a little more detail so we can understand at a glance why this question is being asked.

If you were older with greater perspective on life, then you might be able to ask, “how mixed are these signals? Or, “how would you interpret it if I said this: ....”

One generally says yes.

It’s not a dumb question because everyone has wondered it and in the beginning of every new relationship you have to wonder it, and find the answer to it, before the relationship can progress. So how is it a dumb question? It sounds dumb coming from a 13 year old, sure, but that’s only because most things sound dumb coming from a 13 year old who is infatuated with some dumb boy. Speaking from experience here. I was a dumb 13 year old obsessed with a kid who now has 3 children to 3 different moms. Man I had good taste. 10 years later I still ask it. Hell I’m asking it right now.But not out loud usually, just to myself. No difference really though. And yeah it’s usually not as simple as “does he like me” but that’s the question you’re usually trying to answer in the end, really. What do these mixed signals mean….AKA DOES HE LIKE ME

Sounds like a dumb question to me, but I also feel like people post that and that “type” of question to get people to validate them. “Oh, youi’re so great, how could he NOT like you?” People seek apporval without knowing why, and on a forum like this it’s ultimately useless. We, as @gailcalled pointed out, have no way of knowing the actual particulars. And getting a stroke from a stranger on the internet may be temporarily uplifting, but has not way of actually affecting anything in real life.
It’s not something I generally bother with, because I don’t feel like I have anything useful to say that a child is going to want to hear.
I’m here for a bit of adult conversation. “Does he like me?”, “What does it mean if someone says….?”, and “Should I tell her off on fb?” are not topics of conversation I’m here to take part in. I have kids if I want prattle.

There are no dumb questions only dumb answers.

@Lightlyseared that’s a relief, so perhaps now someone can finally answer me this question: if I stand on railroad tracks with both feet, and somehow manage to grab the cables running above, will I start moving forward or backwards?

Asking the question is just a way to try to get the answer rather than learn the hard way. It never works because no one can judge for sure when it’s people you do not know. Encouragement of the individual’s own judgment would probably be a good answer.

@fremen_warrior I imagine it all depends on the direction of the next train to pass by

so…. was that a dumb answer?

Chuangtse and Hueitse had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed, “See how the small fish are darting about! That is the happiness of the fish.”

“You not being a fish yourself,” said Huei, “how can you know the happiness of the fish?”

“And you not being I,” retorted Chuangtse, “how can you know that I do not know?”

“If I, not being you, cannot know what you know,” urged Huei, “it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know the happiness of the fish.”

“Let us go back to your original question,” said Chuangtse. “You asked me how I knew the happiness of the fish. Your very question shows that you knew that I knew. I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge.”

Not dumb at all. I say dating is always like you are 16 at every age. It’s giddy, unsure, conversation for girlfriends. Sometimes the people on the outside are better about being objective, but in the end you need to read the signs, you know how he treats you, talks to you, the rapport between the two of you.

@Lightlyseared dumb answer to a dumb question and my point was people need to stop repeating cliches, it’s a waste of others’ time.

@fremen_warrior But I enjoy wasting time, both mine and other peoples daft enough to play along That’s why I Fluther.

Also, and this is the real point here, the reason cliches become cliches is because the original idea had some truth or worth in it, that’s why they get repeated. Repeating something over and over doesn’t actually make it meaningless. The fact it seems meaningless is just jamais vu.

Definitely not dumb, but often enough if you have to ask, the answer is no.

Certainly not always, though.

It is not a dumb question. It is silly, however, to expect others to answer it on your own behalf. Talk about being a weanie…or is it weenie?

Not dumb. We’ve all been there, at 16 or 30 or 60. It’s just pretty much unanswerable. Even if 99% of the time a certain action indicates that he likes you, there’s always that 1% to come along and fuck up your daydream.

Hmmmm, sometimes. Depends on the day and my mood when I see it, as to whether or not I think it’s dumb. :D

And you already know that I like you so there’s no need to ask. I do wish you would stop calling me “he”, though.

Most of those questions are too obvious, but they’re not all obvious.

@Lightlyseared smart: I reply, I’m ”daft enough to play along” I don’t, I don’t get to argue my point; placed on the horns of choice, I get gorred either way I turn.

But back to the subject at hand. “The real point here” uh.. no, not really. You weren’t even MAKING a point until I chimed in, lol. My point was that throwing cliched sayings around really does not help anyone. Unless you are the kind of person who can get inspiration off of a motivational poster (hey whatever floats your boat).

Seems to me you would sooner keep on using ad personam, and the like, rather than admit to being wrong, or at least entertain that thought. You just want to argue for argument’s sake. Fine, I’ll bite.

I did not say repetition is what makes those meaningless, what I mean is they have little intrinsic value in a civilised society, where most of us already know these by heart. What good does it do to tell someone the “obvious” then, when what they need is a real answer?

…besides you trying to sound deep, and score some of that sweet, sweet lurrrrve? ;-)

(kudos for the AlienBreed avatar btw)

I am so reluctant to admit that THIS of all threads has gotten me to thinking about what really irks me about the repetitive question I have come to hate. It was something @wundayatta said above about perspective gained from years of living and how a more life-experienced person may ask the same question without generating the same sense of “something” in my gut. My issue comes from how a more life-experienced person might ANSWER the question and this is where I have gotten with my thinking:

1. The person asking the question is popular in school and comes here for more people to puff up his/her already raging ego and I don’t want to be a party to it. My feeling—annoyed.

2. The person asking the question is so unpopular in school and has no real friends to bounce his/her query against and comes to an anonymous place just to check in on something that doesn’t quite feel right based on that individual’s life experience. I don’t have enough words to cobble something together to keep that person from being seriously impacted by their desire for it to be true and the reality of the “joke” as it unfolds with our question-asker as the brunt of it. My feeling—incredibly sad and powerless.

There are any number of other combinations, but the specter of #2 above is where I get stuck. Person #1, I want to smack with words and Person #2, I want to hug with words and I can’t tell them apart. If Person #2 is hungry for anything that passes for affection, however temporary, I don’t want to burst the bubble and this conflicts with my intrinsic desire to warn. All of this is offset by my own desire for Person #2 to have found someone who really does like him/her. I don’t think it is likely, but I root for the underdog.

So, if you read that I have responded to such a question with encouragement for the question-asker to catch up on the After School Specials (@Rebbel—these are movies for young people that used to play on TV in the late afternoons), I am being sincere. Person #1 and Person #2’s issues are both very well addressed because these are themes that repeat across generations. Similarly, Lifetime Television for Women handles the same themes with adult sufferers (and usually end in murder for some reason) which gives me a clue that this is part of the universal struggle to like or be liked.

I lived my own years of teen-angst and didn’t have the internet as a resource. I am conflicted as to whether it is a viable resource (but I am happy to refer to TV, perhaps the same sort of resource for my generation, just as cautionary tales in books were to my parents).

In a world where things can go from zero to deadly with a poorly placed glance, it seems the next generation needs cautionary tales more than ever. So my great annoyance with the flippant question, “Do you think he likes me?” is because I have a life of experience to warn me that the answer is far more complex than the question or than the question-asker can even begin to imagine and someone is bound to get hurt . . .