I'd like to tell you I learned from Noa. I did. I learned slowly, which is a different thing.

Momone arrived about the time Noa was drifting into "later." She was, if anything, prettier – the sort of pretty where the waiter forgets what you ordered – and her thread was warm, quick and polite in a way that read as interest. Coffee was good. Very good. I walked out of it thinking, this one's different.

Then, a few days after the coffee, after we had already booked dinner – restaurant chosen, time confirmed, her "楽しみ！" sticker sitting in the thread – came the message. お食事2は難しいですか？😢 "Would dinner at 2 be… difficult?" With the crying face.

I'd seen that message before. Not a message like it. That message. Noa had sent the same nine characters and the same emoji, at the same point in the same sequence: after the coffee, after the booking, before the meal. It isn't a question, it's a script, and it's a very good one. "Is it difficult?" makes you the one with the problem. The 😢 makes you the one causing it. And because the dinner is already in the calendar, saying no means either cancelling on a woman you've just had a lovely coffee with, or sitting across from her having refused – and either way it looks like it is difficult, because you don't actually have the money. Nobody can say no to that… and that's the point. The ask is timed for the exact moment when the cost of no is highest and the cost of yes is "only" ten thousand yen.

I'd seen this film. I had, in fact, seen it that month, and I knew how it ended, and I bought a ticket anyway. My reasoning – and I use the word loosely – was that Noa's ask had been a coincidence, that Momone's coffee had been better, and that a man who'd just spent a summer learning to read the stats could surely tell the difference between a dinner farmer and a woman who happened to like dinner. I could not. Nobody can. That is the whole point of the pattern: at the moment it appears, it looks like a good sign.

Three dinners. All lovely. Same deferrals, slightly different vocabulary. And then, at the third, when I finally asked the direct question, an answer that was more direct than Noa's had ever been: she didn't feel that way. Not "not yet." Not "when work calms down." She just didn't. She said it kindly and without a flicker, and I realised she'd probably known since the coffee and had been waiting, politely, for me to ask.

I paid, I thanked her, I meant it. Then I went home and did something I should have done after Noa. I wrote the pattern down.

Accepts terms without a counter. Warm thread. Good coffee. Asks to double the dinner rate after. Defers the rest indefinitely.

It's not that any one of those is bad. It's the sequence. The dinner rate goes up at the exact moment she's confirmed you're real, solvent and pleasant, because from her side that's the moment the product has been validated. Dinner is the product. Everything else is the sales pitch that keeps the product moving.

The version of me that met Noa didn't have a rule. The version that met Momone had a rule and broke it, because she was beautiful and the coffee had gone well. The version writing this has a better rule, and it's not about saying no – it's about when the question gets asked. My conditions now go in the very first message, all three stages, before anyone's seen anyone. Some women reply with their own – usually a different number on the later stages – which is exactly how it should work: two people who haven't met, stating terms, and either they line up or they don't. What I haven't had, not once since Momone, is the crying face. Turns out お食事2は難しいですか？ only works when the number wasn't already on the table.