Noa was twenty, worked in a bar, and was – I want to be precise about this – the kind of pretty that makes other people in the restaurant slightly worse at their jobs. She accepted my terms without a single counter, which I took as a good sign. It was a sign. It just wasn't that one.

We met for coffee, and she was a magazine cover. She was also lovely. Warm, quick, laughed at the right things, laughed at a couple of the wrong ones out of kindness. Her LINE style was all hearts and stickers and unprompted "get home safe" messages, which I found charming and which I've since learned means nothing at all either way. Some of the warmest threads I've had were with women who never intended to see me twice. Some of the coldest were with women who now see me every fortnight.

After the coffee – and this is the tell, though I couldn't read it yet – she asked if we could make dinner a 2. Not unreasonable, on its face. She was young and beautiful and the market for beautiful twenty-year-olds at dinner is what it is. I said yes. I was, at that point, saying yes to most things.

What followed was three very nice dinners.

I mean that. They were nice. Nishiazabu, counter seats, good food. She ate like a rugby forward and told me, without irony, that she was under pressure to diet. I told her that was insane. She agreed, and ordered dessert. One night she pushed back a bar shift so we could meet for an hour after a gig I'd been roped into at the last minute; I bought her chocolate, because I'm from Bristol and that's how we say thank you. On paper it was going wonderfully.

And every time the conversation drifted toward what came after dinner, it drifted back – but never with a no. Twice she said yes. Yes, later, when work calms down; yes, once we can do an earlier dinner so there's time afterwards. Both perfectly reasonable. Both, in hindsight, the same sentence. A "not yet" with a condition attached looks exactly like a plan. It's only a plan if the condition ever gets met.

She never initiated anything physical, and I'd like to say I noticed, but what I actually noticed was that she didn't shy away from it, and I decided that was the same thing. It isn't. Not shying away is what you do when someone is paying for dinner. Initiating is what you do when you want something. I'd been reading the absence of a no as a yes, and there is a word for men who do that, and the word is "customers."

By dinner three, work had not calmed down and the early dinner had not materialised, and I finally understood that the two yeses were a kinder way of saying what a no would have said. She liked me. She liked the dinners. She wasn't in the market for the rest, and she probably never had been. I never got a no. I got a "later" that had no date in it, and eventually I stopped asking for one.

Here's what I understand now that I didn't then. On this app there are women running a business, and there are women looking for one person, and there is a third kind: women who just like going to nice restaurants with someone pleasant who pays. They aren't scamming anyone. They turn up, they're good company, they eat well, and they leave. The price ask straight after coffee is the signature – raise the dinner rate, because dinner is the product, and then let the other thing recede politely forever. Noa was the third kind. Three dinners is what it cost me to learn the category existed.

The fix, which I now use every time, is embarrassingly simple: the very first message to someone includes my expected trajectory: "If our vibes match, I'd want this to move forward after a couple of dinners; does that fit?" A no costs a coffee. The same no at dinner three costs three dinners and a chunk of the summer.

She still sends the occasional sticker. I still think she's one of the nicest people I met on there. I've just stopped taking her to dinner.

A footnote, because it took me a while to work out.

There's a small but real population of men who'd be perfectly happy with what Noa was offering: turn up, sit across from a beautiful twenty-year-old who's delighted to see you, at a restaurant you'd never take a colleague to. I'm not one of them. I can find pleasant people to have dinner with, male or female, without an app. I was looking for something in addition to dinner, not dinner.

And I now see why she asked for 2 rather than 1. Dinner at ¥10,000 isn't a business. Most men on the app want more than dinner, so most of them leave after one or two, or after however many it takes them to stop believing the next one will be different. That means she's constantly refilling the calendar – new conversations, new schedules, new cancellations from men whose work ran late – and dinners don't scale: you can only eat one at a time. Net it out over the hours spent messaging, waiting and being stood up, and ¥10,000 a dinner is a bad hourly rate with a lot of strangers attached. At ¥20,000 it's probably viable. She was pricing correctly. I just wasn't the customer.

To be fair to Noa – she never claimed otherwise. Plenty of women on the app write kenzen nomi – "wholesome only" – in the profile, and you know where you stand on the potential for hotel dates before you've said hello. Noa didn't. Whether that meant she was open to it with someone and I wasn't that someone, or whether it was never on the table for anyone and leaving it unsaid kept the dinners coming, I can't tell you. The honest answer is that from where I was sitting the two cases look identical. Which is rather the point.