Making decisions for other people

I was talking to a very good friend of mine recently about how I sometimes feel that I just want to cut some dates short because I don't want to waste the other party's time and effort needlessly. I always thought that I was being very polite to attempt to adhere to a policy like that, but my friend begged to differ. She was telling me that I had no such right to make decisions like that for other people. For a while I didn't really grasp her point that well and left it at that, thinking that of course there is nothing wrong with my view and that she had simply not understood it. That she had missed the point regarding how courteous I was in not dragging things on needlessly.

But I do have to admit that I may have finally understood what she meant by this. I recently went out on a couple of dates with this girl and after last January and some silly rebounding after that I had decided that instead of just trying to rush into anything, I would primarily just try to get to know people and if things didn't click, I would at least try to be friends, assuming they weren't totally horrid. This was more or less what happened with the girl; she was cute and fun to be around, but I hadn't really felt any real connection. I had been honest with her that I was mainly looking for just new friends and didn't necessarily feel like forcing myself into a relationship, having seen what that is like. And I have to admit that this casual pseudo-dating was actually surprisingly fun, even without having any sort of agenda. My theory is that a person should try to meet and get to know a very wide group of acquantances from very different places in an attempt to broaden one's own horizons, and this was the primary motivation, as such.

In situations like these, however, there seems to be a very high probability of some type of expectation mismatch occuring. I should've understood that whereas I was just in it for the fun, she might've been looking for something else, something more than just friendship and that she would feel as if she's wasting time if it is clear that there are no deeper feelings present. But the way in which she articulated this was so much a cliché and illustrated my friend's point in such a clear way that I couldn't help but laugh when I understood how silly I had undoubtedly sounded in the past. Her comment was that "She feels that I might not be looking for a girl like her." The was obviously very clear, but hearing that myself made me understand how stupid it is to phrase it like that. How could she know what I was looking for and how could she make a decision like that for me? A better phrasing would've been "You're not what I'm looking for" instead. As a matter of fact, I'm quite ashamed that I've also been scared enough to avoid direct confrontation myself and used phrases like the former in an attempt to not have to say the latter. The former is of course politically very nice, but incredibly annoying and spawns the following questions: a) do you suggest that you are so good at interpreting people that you know what they think, b) are you so afraid of confrontation that you cannot take ownership of your own decision, and c) do you think that that actually works?

So, to summarize, another lesson learned. And to whomever it may concern, I do have to offer my apologies for not being the upstanding person I thought I was. But I am learning, and I guess that's always a good thing.