My modest contribution to the world of dating.
Is he serious? That is a manifestly imprecise question, I would say. Even a redundant one.
Is he serious in relation to me? Well, that is a much better question.
A necessary disclaimer: obviously the above is relevant with the genders reversed. Women know how to create feelings of confusion and uncertainty about their intentions just as efficiently as Neanderthals do.
You understand, someone can be terrifyingly serious about one woman and manifestly unserious about another.
And then the seemingly obvious question arises: how can I make him serious?
And here is the dispiriting answer. You cannot.
The mental position of the other person, especially in the initial stages, depends entirely on him, and mainly on the subjective baggage he drags with him to those first dates.
Shall we put that in plain language?
The term serious is a poor and foolish one. It is in fact an economical substitute for the question of whether he intends to continue.
The thing is that even the person himself has no way whatsoever of predicting his own future degree of seriousness — even if he declares with passion that he is looking for a serious relationship, and even if he believes with the same passion the necessary lies he is selling himself.
A human being arrives at a meeting with another human being with a car, with a wallet, and with a prior, hidden and enormous set of expectations.
Some of them realistic. Most of them not.
In other words, he thinks he knows what he wants. In practice, he does not.
A far more important question than what do I want is the question what do you need. Or in fuller and more formal phrasing: what do you require from a partner over time in order to be in a happy, satisfied and relatively stable mental position?
And there is no way of discovering that answer in advance. It is not given. It has to be investigated, built together, worked towards.
Which is why the first three dates cannot tell you what you are trying to make them tell you — and why treating them as an assessment rather than an introduction wastes the only thing they are actually good for.