I’d like to add a caveat (not just about romantic/sexual attraction, but about social interactions in general) to the idea of inferring how much someone likes you from how much time they want to spend with you: deontologists/theists/people from guess cultures (to point in the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace) sometimes will want to interact with you not because they think they would enjoy it, but because they think they have an obligation to.
(My parents both grew up in such a culture (I heard that in certain parts of Naples, rejecting someone’s offer of coffee was considered as rude as insulting them), so when I and my sister were growing up (and were extremely socially awkward) they constantly drummed into our heads the meme that when people (who are mostly from the consequentialist/atheist/ask culture cluster in personspace where we grew up) stood us up, it was their fault because they were assholes (which didn’t explain why they stood up us but not each other); they hardly ever hypothesized it was our fault because we just weren’t fun to be around. (On the other hand, I sometimes went to parties with people I found very boring because I just didn’t realize I was allowed to not go there.) I wish I had realized that much earlier. (Even today, my mother insists that I ought to offer private tutoring for free to a friend of my sister’s because otherwise she would cut a bad figure, that I ought to pick as my doctoral advisor the same professor who supervised my MSc thesis because otherwise he might be disappointed, and other crap like that.)
I’d like to add a caveat (not just about romantic/sexual attraction, but about social interactions in general) to the idea of inferring how much someone likes you from how much time they want to spend with you: deontologists/theists/people from guess cultures (to point in the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace) sometimes will want to interact with you not because they think they would enjoy it, but because they think they have an obligation to.
(My parents both grew up in such a culture (I heard that in certain parts of Naples, rejecting someone’s offer of coffee was considered as rude as insulting them), so when I and my sister were growing up (and were extremely socially awkward) they constantly drummed into our heads the meme that when people (who are mostly from the consequentialist/atheist/ask culture cluster in personspace where we grew up) stood us up, it was their fault because they were assholes (which didn’t explain why they stood up us but not each other); they hardly ever hypothesized it was our fault because we just weren’t fun to be around. (On the other hand, I sometimes went to parties with people I found very boring because I just didn’t realize I was allowed to not go there.) I wish I had realized that much earlier. (Even today, my mother insists that I ought to offer private tutoring for free to a friend of my sister’s because otherwise she would cut a bad figure, that I ought to pick as my doctoral advisor the same professor who supervised my MSc thesis because otherwise he might be disappointed, and other crap like that.)