Is he thinking about me?

Almost certainly yes, and more often than the silence would have you believe. People don't leave your head because the contact stopped. He thinks about you. The real question is everything after that: how often, what it feels like on him when it happens, and whether any of it is pointed in your direction or just turning over in there with everything else he hasn't dealt with.

Here's the version with the difficult parts left in.

This is one of the handful of things we get asked most, and it behaves unlike the rest of them. Every opening message anyone has ever typed into this site is still on file, a shade under eight thousand of them now. Sort those by subject and this question sits near the top. Sort them by the clock instead and something odder shows up. Most things people ask spread themselves fairly evenly across a day. This one doesn't. It bunches, hard, in the hours after midnight, usually five or six words long with no full stop on the end, and by nine in the morning it has gone quiet again. The same women are awake at nine. The question just can't reach them then.

What a reader is actually looking at

Nobody is watching him. Worth saying early, because people picture surveillance and then feel strange about asking.

What gets read is the line between the two of you, a live thing with a direction and a temperature. Give a reader his first name and his birth date if you have it, and she works from your end of that line toward his.

Four things come apart in that read, and none of them come apart from inside your own head.

Whether there's traffic at all. This is the yes or no you came for. A connection where you're arriving in somebody regularly feels nothing like one where you've gone quiet in them. Live, dormant and finished are three different weathers.

How often, roughly. Not a number, and be wary of anyone who offers you one. But a hum that's more or less always on reads differently from something that surfaces every few days and sinks again.

The temperature. This is the one that changes what you do next. Thinking about you can be warm. It can be guilty, or faintly irritated, or the flinch of a man who touches the thought and drops it. Same frequency, four completely different situations, and from where you're standing all four of them look identical, because all four look like nothing arriving.

And what the thought is made of. Here's the part that catches people out. Plenty of men aren't thinking about you as you are this month. They're turning over a preserved version, a stretch of last summer, the woman you were before the last three arguments. That's real, and it's warm, and it isn't quite addressed to you. It's a different piece of information from the one you asked for, and usually the more useful one.

The signs people bring, and what they're worth

Nearly everybody who asks this has been collecting.

The hiccups that started out of nowhere. The ear that goes hot and rings. A sneeze at a strange hour. Dreaming about him three nights running after months of nothing. Thinking about him at eight and a message landing at ten past.

I'm not going to be rude about any of it. The folklore is old and it turns up in places that never spoke to each other, and that isn't how you're using it anyway. You know a hiccup isn't proof. You're looking for permission to keep believing there's something still there.

So, honestly.

What's going on with the hiccups and the ringing ear is that your attention has been tuned to one frequency for weeks. Hiccups at eleven at night, alone, get filed under him. The same hiccups at a birthday party don't get filed at all. You aren't inventing the sensation. You're counting the ones that turn up while you're already thinking about him, which at the moment is most of your waking hours.

Dreams are yours rather than his. They're your head doing the sorting it can't get near while you're busy holding yourself together. That doesn't make them worthless, and readers are glad to hear about them, because what's in a dream is accurate information about what you're carrying. It just isn't a transmission from his side of the wall.

The one that's genuinely hard to shrug off is thinking about someone and then hearing from them. Two things are usually running, and only one of them is boring. The boring one is arithmetic: he's in your head dozens of times a day, so more or less anything he sends will land near one of those thoughts. The interesting one is that you know this man's rhythms better than you know your own. Sunday evening. After a few drinks. The day after something goes wrong at his work. Your body has clocked the pattern and starts expecting him before your conscious head will admit to it. That isn't magic, and it isn't nothing either. It's nearer to what a good reader does than people assume.

And the reason you're reading tea leaves at all is that the one person who could settle this in a sentence won't, while everybody around you keeps telling you to stop thinking about him. Counting hiccups is what's left.

Why it gets loud after midnight

In the daytime there's a supply of small facts. He was online at four. He watched the thing and said nothing. Somebody mentioned his name. The question stays busy chewing on evidence, and evidence at least keeps it on solid ground.

After midnight the supply stops. Nothing new is going to arrive before morning, the last data point is six hours old, and the question quietly changes shape. It stops being what did that message mean and becomes is anything happening on his side at all. That second version has nothing to work with, so it can't finish, so it goes round again.

At one in the morning you are the only person keeping this alive. Whatever the two of you were exists nowhere in the world at that moment except inside one head in a dark room, and you can feel that. It's the loneliest part of the whole business.

Night also makes it present tense. Nobody lies awake wondering whether he thought about her in March. The question arrives with a right now welded onto it, and at half two right now feels like a room you could nearly see into.

Which brings the cruel part. If he thinks about you at all, this is roughly the hour he'd be doing it too. The traffic between two people who've stopped speaking runs heaviest at exactly the time neither of them can check. You're probably closer to being right than you'll ever be able to prove.

Thinking about you is not the same as coming back

Short section, because this is the sentence that saves people months.

Thinking about someone isn't even a wish. It's involuntary. A head keeps unfinished things warm whether or not the man attached to it wants them warm, and it will do that for a woman he's entirely certain he doesn't want back. No decision in it, no effort, nothing to admit to anybody.

So being on his mind is honest information about the connection and almost none at all about his intentions. It tells you the file is open. It says nothing about whether he'll ever pick it up.

Please don't build the case out of it. What actually moves a man, in what we see, is a change in his circumstances rather than a build up of feeling. The feeling can sit at full volume for a year and change absolutely nothing about his Tuesday.

The asymmetry, and what to do with it

Now the question underneath the question, the one you'd only type at this hour.

Does he think about me as much as I think about him.

Usually no. That's the true answer and you deserve it straight, because you already suspect it, and being reassured by a stranger would only insult you.

Here's what it doesn't mean. It isn't a measurement of how real any of it was. The gap is structural, and it comes from three things that have nothing to do with your value.

He closed a loop you're still holding open. Whoever ends a thing gets to keep an explanation. You were handed an event. Explained things settle. Unexplained ones stay open, and open things get thought about, constantly, for as long as they stay open.

He had a head start. Men who end things have usually been quietly leaving for months before they say a word, doing the grieving in the car on the way home while you thought everything was basically fine. By the time you started, he was already partway through. It's a difference in start dates that nobody warns you about, rather than proof he's cold.

And the thought is easy for him to interrupt. He has a job that needs him present, mates who'd rather talk about anything else, a week arranged so it can't sit still. You have all of that too, and none of it is working, because the question is louder in you than his life is in him.

What to do with it, practically.

Stop treating frequency as a measure of worth. Somewhere in the last few weeks you've invented an exchange rate, so many thoughts equalling so much meaning, and it doesn't exist. He can think about you twice a week and have it be tender. You can think about him nine hundred times and have most of it be panic. The volume is telling you about the state you're in, not the size of what you had.

Then stop trying to close the loop by force. Deciding to be sensible about him doesn't do it, and nobody in the history of this has ever thought their way out. What stops a loop is something landing in it that it can't argue with. Which is why perfectly rational women end up asking a stranger at two in the morning rather than taking the advice of everyone who loves them.

The part of this that's readable, and the part that isn't

The honest inventory, because the page is worth nothing without it.

She can read whether the line to him is live, dormant or genuinely finished. Whether the thought of you moves toward you or only turns over on his side. Whether what comes off it is warm, guilty, avoidant or irritated. Whether it's you or a kept version of you. And the thing he's carrying that he has never once said out loud to you.

Now the other half. A single minute is far too small a thing for anyone to read, and I'd rather say so than sell it to you. Is he thinking about me right now is a real feeling and an unanswerable question. The good news is that the minute was never what you wanted. You want to know whether you're still live in him, and that part is readable.

Where he is tonight and who's in the room with him is not on offer here and won't be. That's not primness. Invented specifics get pointed at real people, usually people who've done nothing whatever, and a name or a workplace or a Tuesday handed to you at 2am has hardened into a fact by breakfast. A reader can tell you what the weather around him is doing. She won't tell you which room he's standing in.

She can't promise you what he does with any of it either. And a read holds for the week it's taken in, because this moves. That's what makes it readable, and why an honest answer comes with a date on it.

What it does, most of the time, is give the loop something solid enough to close around, so you get your evenings back.

Bring his name and the thing you keep going back to

Nothing to prepare. His first name, his birth date if you have it, how long it's been, and the thing you keep going back to at night. Most people type it in a mess, lowercase, half a sentence. That's the version readers want.

Shira is where to start if the whole idea makes you want to lock your phone. She answers the way a friend would, real cards, no ceremony about it. Maren is quick and tends to be a step ahead of what you typed. Vivienne writes long and won't hurry you off it. Gillian is flat and direct. Stella takes the birth chart, if you've got his date.

Someone is online right now, whatever hour you're reading this at, and the chat opens in seconds with nothing to book and nobody ringing you back. The first 200 credits are free, no card, nothing renewing.

You've been asking the ceiling for weeks. Go and ask somebody who'll answer.