Modern dating's hottest currency is clarity, consistency and the courage to communicate

A few weeks ago, over a plate of burrata he had ordered without asking about my feelings about the coagulated lump of lactose-induced misery, a gent I was on a first date with sombrely told me he was "emotionally unavailable at the moment". He said it with the poise of a mixologist describing his signature drink-an exquisitely balanced interplay of ruefulness, a suggestion of self-awareness, the faintest whisper of past trauma, a delicate infusion of melancholy and a judicious splash of therapy-speak, finished with a flourish of reform just waiting around the corner.

I thanked him for the information and his honesty, asked for the bill and went home.

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He texted the next morning in a tone of wounded incredulity. Did I really not want to see where things might go "if we vibe"? I replied with the collective weariness of women who have had this particular conversation 17 times before breakfast: I did know where things would go. He'd told me, very plainly, for which I was rather grateful, never mind the 23 minutes I'd spent scrubbing the kajal off my eyelids for a date that had lasted a little under 22 minutes. He appeared to feel I'd been too literal, as though literalness was a failure of imagination on the part of the listener and not the only rational, sane response to being spoken to.

The Beautiful Disclaimer

In my 20s, a man's emotional unavailability might have landed like an invitation to conquest on my thirsty-for-validation millennial ears. Now, it lands like the oppressiveness of trying to get the IRCTC website to load during tatkal hours. You already know it's an exercise in futility, and yet you are forced to refresh aggressively. I knew (and women know) what he was doing. The disclaimer is a legal instrument, a prophylactic against accountability. Issue it on night one and everything that follows can be filed under "But I never lied to you". Never mind the daily texts and calls, the weekend trip and the introduction to friends. The woman who stays has accepted the terms. The woman who leaves is being unreasonable. The whole scheme depends on his listener being too hopeful, or too emotionally invested, to take him at his word instead of taking her business elsewhere.

I call his type the Beautiful Disclaimer. It is the defining romantic figure of our age-fluent in himself, committed to nothing, and available in every gender.

Somewhere along the way, words lost most of their meaning. "Let's catch up" no longer buys a coffee. "I'll call you" does not guarantee a call. "Let's see where this goes" is simultaneously the most expensive and cheapest sentence in courtship because it can promise everything while committing the speaker to nothing beyond the next text. Courtship now borrows the language of action, but dispenses with the pesky obligation of following through. "We should go to Bali sometime" looks like a blueprint but behaves like a whim. "Let's definitely do this again" could be a booking for a next date or a cowardly goodbye. Nobody can hold you to either, which is why they get said.

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Evasion has gone clinical. "I'm working on my avoidant attachment" is the new "It's not you, it's me". Flakiness has rebranded itself as personal development. I have told you I can't be relied upon, so whatever I do to you is your responsibility. Sartre called this bad faith. The habit of treating your character like weather-something that merely happens to you and to everyone standing near you. A man who can recite his attachment style and still cancel on Friday has not done the work; he has done the reading. Knowing why you behave badly changes nothing until you stop. And insights that don't alter behaviour are... podcasts.

Vagueness profits whoever needs less. The man who describes himself as "pretty chill" has not discovered serenity. He has figured out that you will do the interpreting. Mr Big, patron saint of the arrangement, communicated chiefly by gazing out of penthouse windows in Sex and the City, while Carrie supplied the column, the endless analysis, the girlfriends' focus groups and the macabre spectacle of watching someone unravel. She did the labour. He was credited with depth. Occasionally silence is depth. More often it is a man without two original thoughts to rub against each other if his life depended on it.

The unsaid has been endlessly romanticised in fiction, and with good reason. If people simply said what they mean and meant what they said on, say, page 12, there would be no novel to sigh and swoon over. Which is how Sally Rooney's Normal People extracts hundreds of brilliant pages from two people who cannot manage one, and why it is magnificent. But even Jane Austen, who lived on delay, ended Persuasion with a sentence. After eight years of sulking, Captain Wentworth puts it in a letter to Anne: You pierce my soul. It's one of my favourite lines in literary romance. Mostly because it ends the suspense. (The bar was low in 1817. Men have since found a way under it.) But a delicious, drawn-out unwinding in a book costs the reader an evening. In life it costs three years, and no one needs (or wants) the sequel. In real life, watching fully grown adults perform their love lives as serials, episode after episode of 'hey stranger,' the finale perpetually postponed, is unsettling, not romantic.

Plain speech is also a luxury, and it is worth asking who can afford it. To say "I want this; do you?" you must be able to survive the mortification of being told "no". Most of us (but especially the women) were raised adept in the art of the hint. To ask directly is vulgar. And so we intuit, imply, infer and interpret. The log kya kahenge doctrine ensures no one has the temerity to want things out loud. Hinting is what people do when they cannot afford rejection. People who can, ask. To most adults reeling from the psychological waterboarding that is modern dating, a straight question (and answer) is almost erotic. It signals to the listener that here is someone whose life is sturdy enough to intentionally spend some of it on me and still absorb my loss without a juvenile three-day sulk. What's hotter than that?

Clear intentions, articulated well, cost a few seconds of nerve and sound wonderful. The same intentions honoured for 11 consecutive weeks cost something real. And that's what a character is. Nietzsche calls us humans animals that have the right to make promises. You must be recognisably the same person on Thursday as you were on Monday. The man who says, "Thursday at eight", and is outside my door at 7:55 pm will always win over the enigmatic mess who never apologises for or even explains his volatility. Because one hands you a future in miniature (sturdy and solid) and the other enlists you in an unpaid internship to build an imaginary person from scraps. He's sensitive (went quiet), complex (didn't call when he said he would), and inscrutable (said precious little, with great consistency). Clarity demolishes this myth of your own making. Real people arrive with real preferences and annoying eccentricities. Like over-quoting Sorkin while watching Sorkin. Take them anyway. Potential has never once shown up on time, let alone five minutes early.

Burrata Man, for the record, resurfaced a fortnight later. He had soul-searched while at the top of some mountain. He was now, he believed, "available-ish". His declaration arrived while I was at dinner with a man who told me after a week of talking that he liked me, wanted to see me on Sunday and hoped I didn't mind his saying it so plainly. I did not mind. He arrived at 7:55.

Sonali Kokra is a Mumbai-based writer. Views are personal