There's a misread so common it barely registers as an error anymore. Someone doesn't pursue you—doesn't double-text, doesn't rearrange their life to be near you, doesn't perform visible longing—and the immediate social conclusion is: they're not interested. Case closed. Next.
This is wrong. It's also worth examining because the machinery behind it is more interesting than the error itself.
I. We Confused Desire With the Performance of Desire
Blame the troubadours. Blame Hollywood. Blame whatever committee decided that the grand romantic gesture was the unit of measurement for human longing. At some point, wanting someone became a contact sport—hunger turned aerobic, desire became a verb that required witnesses. If you weren’t reaching, you weren’t feeling. The proof was in the pursuit, and the pursuit was the proof, and that circular logic got so baked into the cultural firmware that most people run it without ever noticing it’s running.
Here’s what the logic actually says: still equals indifferent, motion equals interested. Simple, clean, wrong. What people are actually detecting when someone doesn’t chase isn’t the absence of desire—it’s the absence of the performance of desire. And those two things are not even distant cousins. They’re not in the same family tree.
The generous read is that this misread doesn’t require bad faith. The person running the inference usually isn’t lying to you. They genuinely can’t locate desire that hasn’t put on its running shoes. They’ve never had to. They’ve only ever been wanted by people who showed it the standard way—through motion, through reach, through visible effort—so when desire arrives dressed differently, the instrument doesn’t register it. It’s not that the signal isn’t there. It’s that the antenna was built for a different frequency.
Which is the problem, isn’t it. Desire has more than one grammar. It always has. We’ve just collectively, lazily, decided that only one of them counts—and then had the audacity to call the other one nothing.
II. Some People Aren’t Chasing For Reasons That Have Nothing to Do With You
Let’s make a list. Not a comprehensive one—just enough to establish that the universe of possible explanations is significantly larger than she’s just not that into you.
[For the record: all of these apply to me personally. They are not mutually exclusive reasons for choosing not to chase what one desires.]
Some people don’t chase because they’ve been through it. Years of opening doors for people who turned out not to be serious—or worse, who turned out to be actively harmful—has a way of reorganizing one’s approach. The structure that looks like withholding isn’t a tactic. It’s load-bearing architecture. You stop chasing because you eventually notice that chasing selects for a particular type, and that type keeps costing you something you’d rather keep.
Some people don’t chase because they’re complete. They’ve built a life they genuinely like. They’re not sitting in a half-furnished interior waiting for another person to make it habitable. What they want is someone to add to something that already exists and is already good—which means they have no gap to frantically close, no urgency to perform, no hollow ache driving them toward whoever’s nearest. This reads as cool. It is, in fact, just a person who did the work.
Some people don’t chase because they’re protecting something—and this is the one that looks most like indifference from the outside while being its precise opposite. An empty house has no locks. If there’s friction, if there’s a little resistance, if it feels like you’d have to earn the door rather than just walk through it—that’s information. What’s inside is worth guarding the way a dragon guards treasure: not carelessly, not for everyone, not on demand.
Some people don’t chase because they trust the current. They have enough faith in what’s real to let it move at its own pace without managing it to death. This registers as detachment. It is actually the steadiest form of interest there is—the kind that doesn’t require constant tending because it isn’t made of anxiety.
And some people communicate in a different register entirely. Presence. Consistency. Not going away. These are signals. Quieter ones, yes—but signals require a receiver, and the right receiver will know exactly what they’re picking up.
Now. How do you tell the difference between all of this and actual indifference? Here’s the tell: the person is still there. Still open. Still present. Still, if you paid attention, keeping the door unlocked even while they decline to knock on yours. Indifference exits. It doesn’t linger in the vicinity with its hands in its pockets and an expression that says I see you, I’m just not going to make it easy. Indifference doesn’t stay put. This does.
One more thing, while we’re here: it’s a particular kind of audacity to have decided someone would be indifferent toward you before you’ve ever actually spoken to them. You don’t know that. You’ve diagnosed a patient you’ve never examined, based entirely on the fact that they haven’t come running. That’s not discernment. That’s a story you’re telling yourself—and it might be the most expensive story you ever believed.
III. What Chasing Is Actually Telling You (It’s Not What You Think)
We’ve made pursuit the gold standard of desire. Flowers at the door, texts at midnight, the whole aerobic romance of I must have you and I will demonstrate this through motion. It’s dramatic. It’s legible. We’re trained to read it as intensity.
Here’s the reframe: sometimes it is intensity. And sometimes it’s anxiety wearing intensity’s coat.
The compulsion to chase—the inability to wait, to hold still, to let something breathe and develop on its own schedule—contains a quiet confession underneath all that momentum: if I don’t go get this, it won’t come. I have to go get it because I’m not worth arriving at. That’s fear dressed as passion. It’s real feeling, genuinely felt—but it’s feeling organized around scarcity. Around the belief that if you stop moving, the thing disappears. Around the suspicion that desire, left unmanaged, won’t survive.
That’s worth sitting with.
Now. The person who doesn’t chase hasn’t suppressed that fear or performed some elaborate indifference routine. They’ve metabolized it. There’s a difference, and it matters. Metabolized means the fear moved through them and left something steadier behind. They can hold the wanting without needing to manage it into visibility, without needing to make it loud enough that they can hear it themselves.
This is also a good moment to note that there’s real estate between frantic pursuit and total stillness—and that real estate is interesting. A slow, deliberate approach. Presence made legible over time. Interest that announces itself quietly and then simply... remains. That’s not chasing. That’s courtship in the original, patient sense of the word, and anyone worth your attention will know the difference between that and desperation. Those two things don’t feel alike. At all.
The bitter irony of all this is that from the outside, metabolized desire and genuine indifference look identical. Both are still. Both are quiet. The person who has never had to metabolize their own fear of loss has no instrument to tell them apart, because the only signal their equipment can read is movement toward me. So they look at stillness and call it nothing—when what they’re actually looking at might be the most honest, non-anxious, durable desire in the room.
What the non-chase is actually saying, translated: I want this, and I’m not frightened enough of losing it to embarrass myself in pursuit. That’s not arrogance. That’s confidence in the reality of the thing. It reads as its opposite. The world keeps getting that one wrong.
IV. The Physics Problem
Here’s where it gets interesting. There are two completely different models of desire operating in any given room at any given time, and they’re largely invisible to each other—which means two people can be standing three feet apart, both feeling something real, and be reading each other with instruments calibrated for entirely different universes.
The first model is pursuit physics. Desire is centrifugal—you throw yourself outward. Intensity is measured by how far you travel, how much you’re willing to compromise your own center of gravity to close the distance. The chase is the proof; the reach is the declaration. This model is legible, athletic, and extremely popular.
The second model is gravity physics. Desire is centripetal. You develop sufficient mass that things begin to orient toward you without your ever leaving your own axis. You don’t lunge. You pull. Your remaining exactly where you are isn’t passivity—it’s the invitation. The orbit is the evidence.
Now here’s the physics problem: if you’re running pursuit physics, gravity is essentially invisible to you. You look at someone exercising it and see a person standing still, apparently unconcerned, apparently doing nothing—because they’re not doing anything you recognize as doing. The movement is all happening around them, not from them, and your instruments weren’t built to track that. So you call it indifference. You call it aloofness. You might even, if you’re having a bad day, call it unfair.
And the gravity person usually can’t explain it to you, because it isn’t a strategy. You can’t strategize your way into mass. You can’t explain mass. It’s structural—accumulated through work that’s largely unglamorous and entirely invisible: the years of becoming, the things burned away, the self that got built in the quiet. Nobody saw that part. They just walked into the room afterward and felt the pull and couldn’t quite account for it.
The orbit doesn’t register as intentional to a pursuit-physics observer. It looks like coincidence. It looks like weather. It looks, frankly, like cheating—like someone getting something they didn’t earn by not doing the thing everyone else is doing. But the mass is earned. Painstakingly. It just wasn’t earned in any way you could watch.
So two people running different physics can occupy the same room, feel genuinely drawn to each other, and completely misread what the other one is doing. Neither is wrong about themselves. Both are wrong about the other. And the tragedy—the real one—is that the misread usually gets attributed to character rather than physics. She’s not interested. He’s playing games. When what’s actually happening is a calibration problem. You’re just speaking different languages and calling each other’s native tongue a silence.
V. The Software Gap (And What It’s Actually Asking For)
Social software is efficient. It has clean scripts for approximately four configurations, and it runs them fast: available and pursuing means interested; unavailable and not pursuing means taken, or not interested; pursuing despite unavailability means obsessed; and then there’s the fourth one—available, not pursuing, genuinely interested—which breaks the machine entirely. There’s no slot for it. No dropdown option for wanting without needing the wanting to be witnessed. So the software does what software does when it hits an unknown input: it assigns the nearest available category, marks the field not interested, and moves on.
Efficient. Wrong. But efficient.
Here’s what’s running underneath that, though, and this is the part nobody wants to say out loud: the demand that someone prove desire through pursuit is almost always a demand for reassurance dressed up as a preference. If you wanted me, you’d show it by moving toward me sounds like a reasonable expectation. What it actually means is I need external behavioral evidence of my own value, and I cannot access that feeling without you supplying it. The chase isn’t just proof of your desire. It’s the thing that makes the other person feel desirable at all. Which is fine—until you meet someone who communicates in a different register and you mistake their fluency for a verdict.
Because the non-chaser isn’t withholding that reassurance. They’re transmitting it constantly—through presence, through consistency, through a kind of quiet continuous signal that says I’m here, I’m open, I’m not going anywhere. The problem is that signal requires a different kind of receiver. The ego that needs the chase doesn’t have one. It reads the stillness as an answer: you’re not chasing me, therefore I’m not worth chasing, therefore you don’t want me. The whole chain runs on a misread, but by the time the feeling lands, it feels indistinguishable from evidence. That’s the cruelest part. It’s a self-sealing error.
What this means, in the end, is that the non-chase is actually the most legible signal in the world—to the right reader. Someone fluent in this grammar doesn’t need the running, the reaching, the 2am declarations. They feel the stillness for what it is: desire settled enough that it doesn’t require management. Interest that’s patient because it respects the object of that interest enough to let them make the right call. Wanting that trusts.
The people who misread it are, almost definitionally, not the reader the signal was meant for.
And honestly? If you’ve read this far and felt quietly, specifically seen—good. The door isn’t locked. It’s just not propped open with a brick and a neon sign. There’s a difference between those two things, and I have a feeling you already know exactly what it is.
—M.
♪ “Drivin’ On 9” by The Breeders ♪
♪ “By The Sword” by iamjakehill ♪
♪ “Stormy Weather” by Etta James ♪
♪ “Before the Night Is Over” by Lords of Acid ♪
♪ “Ramblin’ Man” by Hank Williams ♪
[Hank Williams was my favorite artist when I was 8 years old. My grandfather let me borrow his tape of Hank’s greatest hits and I’d listen to it over and over. Rewind or flip the tape—remember that shit? lol]
I think that about sums it up…
;)
Next Week
Monday — Je pense, donc je danse—la seule vraie résistance..
Freestyle writing on everything from what annoys me when I’m driving to this incredibly kinky AI chat app I tried recently—and many other things besides. Kind of like mini-essays in paragraph form. Just thinking “aloud.” No polish. Just my mind laid bare for your mind.
Thursday — Sin Ump Runs Goo Into Ton Echo
This is a new acrostic ritual poem written on Samhain, 2026. It’s… well, stop in and check it out if you’re feeling brave. ;)