Do I actually like him, or just the attention? How to tell

Actually liking him means the feeling is about who he is on an ordinary afternoon, and not only about how his texts make you feel. The question “do I actually like him?” is a way of sorting that kind of interest from a few look-alikes, such as loneliness, the thrill of the chase, the idea of him and plain nerves.

The questions here work for a crush of any gender, and where a study used only women or only men, that is noted. None of this is a diagnosis or a verdict on anyone’s feelings.

How do you know if you actually like someone?

Closeness to the person and an absence that keeps pulling your thoughts back are two markers from Robert Sternberg’s theory of love, the first for liking someone and the second for feeling more than that.

Sternberg’s triangular theory of love, published in Psychological Review in 1986, splits love into three parts: intimacy, passion and decision/commitment. In his terms, liking is intimacy alone, the closeness, bondedness and warmth of a real friendship, without intense passion or long-term commitment. That is narrower than the way people say they “like” a crush, so his word and the everyday word mean different things.

To tell liking apart from love that goes beyond it, Sternberg proposed what he called the absence test. When a friend goes away, “one may miss the friend, but one does not tend to dwell on the loss.” When a relationship goes beyond liking, “One actively misses the other person and tends to dwell on or be preoccupied with that person’s absence.”

For a crush, the absence might be spring break, a summer internship in another city or a weekend when he goes quiet in the group chat. The useful comparison is whether he crosses your mind now and then, or whether his absence keeps taking up your attention. Sternberg described the absence test as a way to tell kinds of love apart, and it does not score anything. A strong reaction also leaves open which feelings are driving it.

What a crush is made of

This site’s quiz, “How Much Do You Really Like Them?”, treats a crush as a mix and sorts it into six ingredients: genuine feeling, infatuation, habit, loneliness, the chase and admiration. The six are the quiz’s own framework and were not taken from a single study, so the table pairs each one with research only where we found a fit.

The descriptions in the second and third columns are editorial wording, not the quiz’s scoring. The quiz itself has 30 questions about everyday moments, takes about 5 minutes and works for a crush of any gender. When you finish, the result is free to view, including a 0–100 crush score, your crush type and how much of the feeling comes from your main ingredient. The full breakdown of all six ingredients is part of the full report, which unlocks for 10 points.

Do I actually like him, or am I just lonely?

Loneliness is linked with changes in attention and judgment, and a crush that starts during a lonely stretch can still be a real feeling.

Cacioppo and Hawkley reviewed research on perceived social isolation, their term for loneliness, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2009. They report that loneliness is associated with differences in attention and thinking, including “heightened sensitivity to social threats” and “a confirmatory bias in social cognition that is self-protective and paradoxically self-defeating.” These differences, they write, affect emotions, decisions, behavior and interactions with other people.

The review is about loneliness and cognition in general, and it does not study crushes. In our view, it still gives a reason to look twice at a crush that arrived in the first weeks at a new college, the first months in a new city after graduation or the stretch after a breakup. In those weeks, the person who saves you a seat or texts first can take up a lot of space. The review does not say whether such a crush would fade once those weeks felt fuller, with a roommate you get along with or a club that became your people.

The quiz lists loneliness and genuine feeling as separate ingredients in the same mix, so one crush can show some of each.

Do I like him, or the attention and the chase?

Wanting someone and liking them are not always the same thing. A study of playing hard to get shows how the two can come apart, and a study of uncertainty shows how not knowing can raise attraction.

In a study published in Psychological Science in 2011, Whitchurch, Wilson and Gilbert had 47 college women at one U.S. university view the Facebook profiles of four male students who, they were told, had already seen their profiles. Some women were told the men liked them a lot, some that the men liked them an average amount, and some that it was uncertain which. Women in the uncertain group were the most attracted to the men, even more than women told the men liked them a lot. They also reported thinking about the men the most, and the authors’ analysis tentatively linked that thinking to their attraction. The profiles were made up for the study, and nobody met in person.

Dai, Dong and Jia looked at the old idea of playing hard to get in a 2014 paper. They point out that prior research had found little support for it. Their proposal, which two studies confirmed, was that when one person plays hard to get, the other person wants them more and likes them less, and that this happens only when the second person is already psychologically committed to pursuing the relationship. Otherwise, in the authors’ words, “playing hard to get will decrease both wanting and liking.” One of the two studies used male undergraduates in Hong Kong.

Attention is a separate pull, with no games involved. A reply that comes fast one day and late the next, a like on your story or a streak that keeps going is about being noticed. None of the studies cited here measured likes, streaks or reply times. When not knowing where you stand feels especially hard, the guide to anxious attachment covers one pattern behind that.

Could nerves be mistaken for a crush?

A 1974 study suggested that the jitters from a scary situation could be mistaken for attraction, but a 1979 team that tested the idea in four studies did not find the effect.

Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron ran their field experiment on two bridges over the Capilano River in North Vancouver, Canada. The test bridge was the Capilano Canyon Suspension Bridge, five feet wide and 450 feet long, with low wire handrails and a tendency to tilt and sway above a 230-foot drop to rocks and shallow rapids. The comparison bridge, farther upriver, was a solid cedar bridge with high handrails, about 10 feet above a small, shallow stream. A female interviewer approached men crossing without a female companion, asked them to fill out a short questionnaire, then wrote down her name and phone number in case they wanted to talk more about the study.

On the suspension bridge, 9 of the 18 men who took her number later called her, compared with 2 of 16 on the solid bridge. When a male interviewer did the same thing, the two bridges showed no such difference. In a second experiment, men approached on the suspension bridge were compared with men who had crossed it and were contacted at least 10 minutes later, and 13 of 20 called, compared with 7 of 23.

The authors listed their own doubts. The suspension bridge was a tourist attraction, so the men on the two bridges may have been different people, and the suspension-bridge visitors may have been more drawn to thrills. The interviewer may also have come across differently on a swaying bridge than on a solid one. The second experiment was designed to deal with the first two of those problems.

In 1979, Douglas Kenrick, Robert Cialdini and Darwyn Linder published a paper subtitled “Four Failures to Replicate.” None of their four studies found that fear raised attraction. When there was an obvious source of fear, participants put their nervous arousal down to the situation and not to the woman working with the researchers.

A pounding heart before an exam, at a tryout or at the top of a roller coaster is a real feeling. Taken together, the bridge study and the failed repeats leave open whether that kind of nervousness can turn into attraction, and a fast pulse around someone does not settle the question in either direction.

Do I like him, or the idea of him?

Liking a version of someone you have pictured and liking someone more as you get to know them are different experiences, and research on familiarity speaks to the second.

Sternberg called the first kind infatuated love, which he describes as “love at first sight”: passion without the intimacy and commitment parts of love. He writes that infatuations can arise almost instantly and fade just as quickly under the right circumstances, and that they “tend to be somewhat easier for others to spot than for the individual who is experiencing the infatuation.”

Reis and colleagues tested familiarity in two experiments published in 2011. Pairs of previously unacquainted people of the same sex talked with each other for varying amounts of time, and the more they interacted, the more attracted they were to each other. The authors identified three processes that contributed to the effect: feeling that the other person was responsive, growing comfort and satisfaction during the conversation, and a sense of knowing the other person. The paper responded to a 2007 set of studies by Norton, Frost and Ariely, which found that learning more randomly chosen trait words about a stranger led people to view the stranger as less similar and to like them less. Reis’s pairs were strangers of the same sex, and the study was not about romance.

A crush on a teaching assistant, on someone you have only seen across the dining hall or on a person whose life you mostly know through their stories rests on very little real contact. In Reis’s experiments, attraction grew with time spent talking, and the feeling of knowing the other person was one of the three processes behind it. One of the six parts of the quiz’s crush score is called “seeing the real them,” and it covers this ground.

Romantic or platonic? Telling the two apart

In Sternberg’s theory, closeness without passion is the liking of friendship, and closeness with passion added is what he calls romantic love.

The intimacy part covers feelings of closeness, connectedness and bondedness. The passion part covers the drives that lead to romance and physical attraction. Decision/commitment has a short-term side, the decision that you love someone, and a long-term side, the commitment to keep that love going.

Sternberg describes romantic love as liking “with an added element, namely, the arousal brought about by physical attraction.” He also writes that friendships can have elements of passion or long-term commitment, and that in those cases the friendship goes beyond mere liking. A best friend you would tell anything can sit close to that line, and the absence test from the first section applies here as well.

If the closeness is what you value most and the idea of dating them feels beside the point, the feeling fits Sternberg’s description of liking. Friendship itself gets its own treatment in our friendship guide.

When a crush turns into limerence

Limerence is a term coined in 1979 for an intense state of early romantic love, as Aron and colleagues note, and Sternberg wrote that infatuation is essentially the same thing.

Arthur Aron, Helen Fisher and colleagues studied that early stage with brain imaging in a 2005 paper. They scanned 10 women and 7 men, aged 18 to 26, who said they had been intensely in love for 1 to 17 months. In an fMRI scanner, each person alternated between looking at a photo of the person they loved and a photo of a familiar acquaintance, with a distraction task in between. Looking at the loved one activated dopamine-rich areas tied to reward and motivation, including the right ventral tegmental area and parts of the caudate nucleus, and activity in one caudate region was correlated with scores on a passionate love questionnaire. The sample was 17 young adults, and the scans covered only the moments spent looking at photos.

Hatfield and Sprecher built that questionnaire, the Passionate Love Scale, in 1986. In their paper they cite theorists who argue that passionate love first appears in all its intensity in adolescence. A crush that feels overwhelming at 14 or 16 fits what those theorists describe, and the intensity on its own does not show what the crush is made of.

When thoughts of one person crowd out everything else, the guide to limerence goes further into that state. When the real question is whether he likes you back, the signs are covered in how to tell if someone has a crush on you. How people bond in close relationships more broadly is the subject of attachment styles.

The quiz “How Much Do You Really Like Them?” puts a number on how deep a crush goes and names the ingredient doing the most work, and the result comes before any decision about the full report.