Modern Love: He Asked Permission to Touch, but Not to Ghost

For our first date, he took an Uber to my apartment through a winter storm. As the snow fell outside, we sat close on my couch while he talked touchingly about poetry. Two hours in, I was hoping he would kiss me, and he did.

He was a sweet kisser. For an hour we sat with his hand cupped behind my ear, kissing and talking.

We had met on Tinder. I was nearly 30 and he was 24, but our age gap somehow seemed a lot larger than five years. Not because he acted especially young. It was more that when it came to sex and foreplay, he acted so differently from guys my age, asking for my consent about nearly everything.

“Is it O.K. if we go to the bedroom?” he said.

I smiled and led him there.

He tugged at the hem of my sweater and said, “Is it O.K. if I take this off?”

I nodded. Underneath I was wearing a thin tank top.

“Can I take this off, too?” he said.

I laughed. “Of course!”

Off it went.

He kissed my collarbone. I breathed into his neck and pulled off his shirt. He fingered the clasp of my bra.

“Is it O.K. if I take this off?” he said.

I think I snorted. “When you asked about the sweater, that was my yes from the waist up.”

He looked scared. Somewhere in our five-year age gap, a dramatic shift must have taken place in sexual training. I sensed this would be a different kind of hookup than I was used to, but I couldn’t predict how.

I lay down on my bed, and he lay beside me.

“Is this O.K.?” he said.

“I invited a guy from Tinder to my empty apartment on a snow day,” I said. “Let’s just assume you have blanket consent.”

“I’m not comfortable with that.”

I looked at his earnest eyes, hair flopping into his face, stubble that was already reddening my skin (I had already decided I didn’t mind). Hadn’t I already said yes several times? Wasn’t I lying there with him, my leg tossed over his, my whole body arcing toward him?

Then he raised my arm above my head, put his lips to the soft skin of my inner arm, and licked me from armpit to elbow.

I pulled my arm away.

“Is that O.K.?” he said. “Are you O.K.?”

I had been single and sexually active for more than a decade and considered myself to be sexually liberated, but I could not remember anyone having done that to me. “It’s just really intimate,” I said.

Now he was the one who laughed. “That’s intimate?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

He and I seemed to have such different understandings of which acts were assumed to be acceptable and which required voiced consent.

At one point, he put his hand on my throat and asked if the pressure was O.K.

“I’ll tell you if I die,” I joked.

At another point he kissed me from forehead to toe and said, “I think that’s everywhere.” And I almost told him that was unfair; he hadn’t asked my consent. Although I would say yes to all manner of sexual touching, that much sweetness had the power to break my heart.

At the end of the night, he said, “See you soon,” and took an Uber back to his apartment through the snow.

Afterward I sat in bed, thinking about the encounter. I knew I had been a little dismissive of all of his asking, but in fact I had liked it as a form of caretaking. I just wasn’t used to being taken care of in that way.

Sex makes me feel unsafe, not because of the act itself but because my partners so often disappear afterward, whether I waited hours or months before the first time. So it’s after sex when I feel truly vulnerable.

Yet something else about his asking also made me uneasy. It seemed legalistic and self-protective, imported more from the courtroom than from a true sense of caretaking. And each time he asked, it was as if he assumed I lacked the agency to say no on my own — as if he expected me to say no, not believing that a woman would have the desire to keep saying yes.

Still, I liked that he was trying to keep from hurting me unawares. He texted that night, reassuringly. I decided I would call his asking lovely. I decided I would try to learn.

The second time he was in my bedroom, he paused with his hand at the zipper of my dress. “Is this O.K.?” he said.

I looked him in the eye. I didn’t laugh. I said, “Yes.”

He unzipped it, and I slid on top of him, kissed him, started unbuckling his belt. His hips were arcing toward me, but I paused. Learn, I told myself. I said, “Is this O.K.?”

He was taken aback. “I ask you that,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m the one who could make you do something you don’t want to do,” he said. “Not vice versa.”

This was likely true, physically speaking. He was a head taller than me and probably twice as strong. If he wanted to hold me down against my will, he could have.

But that wasn’t what he was trying to do. He and I were enjoying a mutually desired sexual experience, and by making that distinction he was importing the language of coercion and assault into sex that was healthy.

Given our wholly consensual interaction, did it matter who was stronger? Couldn’t we treat each other as two equal human beings, each of whom had invited and agreed to intimate acts? Wasn’t that the beautiful thing he was teaching me, that we could be fully human to each other, checking in, honoring yes and respecting no?

My hand hovered above his belt. Finally he smiled and said yes, and the evening continued.

If I could go back in time, I would have urged him in that moment to really think about why asking for consent even matters. Because the answer, I think, is basic: We want people we’re intimate with to feel good, not bad.

While he was waiting for his Uber to arrive, he said he would cook me dinner next time: steak with sautéed mushrooms and a fig-balsamic reduction.

“I mostly make scrambled eggs,” I said.

He laughed, kissed me and said, “See you soon.”

I did not see him soon. I texted him a few times in the days that followed, playfully at first, then more pressing. He ignored me.

At first I couldn’t believe he didn’t answer, and then I was devastated. My roommates didn’t understand why I was so much more hurt than usual.

“Because he kissed the soft part of my arm,” I said. “And then he disappeared.”

They looked at me blankly.

“Because he asked for my consent, over and over. So sex felt like a sacred act, and then he disappeared.”

“A sacred act?” one roommate said, laughing. “Girl, you sure don’t treat it like one.”

But I do. We perform sacred acts for, with and among strangers all the time. We give charitably to people we don’t know. We pray in churches with people we don’t know.

When he asked so many times about my desires, when he checked to be sure he was honoring and respecting me, then sex, however short-lived, became a reciprocal offering. But the moment we pulled on our jeans, that spell of reciprocal honor and respect was broken.

“Which is fine,” my roommate said.

And she was right, in a way. Asking about my feelings during sex didn’t extend to caring about them after sex. Consent is not a contract of continuation.

But in the days and weeks after, I was left thinking that our culture’s current approach to consent is too narrow. A culture of consent should be a culture of care for the other person, of seeing and honoring another’s humanity and finding ways to engage in sex while keeping our humanity intact. It should be a culture of making each other feel good, not bad.

And if that’s the goal, then consent doesn’t work if we relegate it exclusively to the sexual realm. Our bodies are only one part of the complex constellation of who we are. To base our culture of consent on the body alone is to expect that caretaking involves only the physical.

I wish we could view consent as something that’s less about caution and more about care for the other person, the entire person, both during an encounter and after, when we’re often at our most vulnerable.

Because I don’t think many of us would say yes to the question “Is it O.K. if I act like I care about you and then disappear?”

Courtney Sender is a writer in Boston.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

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