Waiting for someone who never replied

Does no answer mean no?

For most of the people here, yes, eventually, though almost none of them arrived at that by reasoning it out. They went on waiting past the point where they already knew, and what changed was not getting information but running out of ways to read the silence as anything else.

Several here sent one more message asking plainly for an ending or an explanation, and the thing they learned is that the silence held after that too, and that saying everything they needed to say did not make the feeling stop. The ones who stayed stuck longest were not the ones who got no answer, but the ones who had other evidence pulling the other way: tenderness in person, likes on posts, a pattern of coming back after each disappearance.

Ember’s view. The question is usually not really whether no answer means no, but whether you are allowed to act as though it does without the other person's permission. Nobody here got that permission, and the ones who moved at all did so by treating the silence as the answer and letting it count, knowing they might be wrong.

If you are waiting, give the waiting an end date you choose yourself and tell no one, then act on what you find there; the people here who did this still felt the loss, and what they got back was not relief but the end of checking.

Im looking for companionship and it seems the person I like isn't serious about us

The people here who were in that spot found that asking for a clear answer didn't produce one, and that the silence after the asking became the answer they had to work with. Some of them read the silence as the ending and started moving, getting up for work, deciding to stay unattached a while, and found that accepting it did not make the hurt stop on the schedule they expected.

Others stayed with the hope a while longer, going back over the tenderness or the good signs and weighing them against a pattern of disappearing, and the thing that eventually carried more weight for them was the pattern rather than the words. What separated the ones who got some footing was not that they stopped wanting the person, but that they stopped treating the person's clarity as something they could obtain by asking better.

Ember’s view. The question you're turning over, whether they're serious, is one only they can answer, and the people here show that when someone won't answer it in words, the not-answering is already their behaviour telling you where they stand. The harder question underneath, and the one these people actually had to face, is whether your life stays on hold while that answer doesn't arrive.

You could let yourself be open to other company while nothing is settled with them, which the people here who did it found felt disloyal to a hope they weren't ready to drop, and which also stopped their own life from being paused on someone else's silence.

How long should I wait, and should I message again?

No second or third message from anyone here got a reply; the ones that were sent, a thoughtful note, a final message saying what needed saying, a request for clarity, sat on read or on delivered like the first.

The people who were steadier gave themselves a rule instead of an open wait: a date four weeks out before reaching out again, a plain request that an answer come by the end of the day or be taken as no, a decision to take space for now. The ones without a rule describe the waiting becoming its own thing, checking, replaying, imagining the other person's reasons, and it was the open-endedness, more than the silence, that wore them down.

Sending a last message that said what they needed to say did not bring an answer for anyone here, and none of them describes wishing they had not sent it. What people here would tell you is not how long to wait, but to decide, before you wait, what the silence will mean when the time runs out.

How do people get through the waiting?

Mostly by giving the day a shape the silence cannot take: getting up and getting ready for work at half past four, keeping busy on purpose, taking space from the whole situation for now. Some wrote first and then held still, a message that asked for nothing back, a last message that said their piece, and let the not-replying be the other person's to carry rather than theirs.

Several went on making sense of it out loud to themselves, what the tenderness had meant, whether the pattern spoke louder than the words, and found that the sense-making did not make the feeling stop. For a few, the waiting had been going on far longer than this one silence, two years of feeling unwanted, years of messages nobody answered, and this silence was the one that made them stop expecting.

None of them describes a way through that removed the hurt; what they describe is a way to carry it that did not involve the phone.