Dating is usually taught as a feeling: you meet someone, something happens, and the rest is supposed to be obvious. For a lot of neurodivergent women that description is useless, because it describes the weather rather than the map.
So here is the map. Early dating has four stages, and they are not the same thing. First, contact: you are both deciding whether there is enough interest to spend an evening together. Second, exploration: three to six meetings where you are gathering information about how this person behaves, not performing a version of yourself. Third, definition: someone says out loud what this is. Fourth, integration: your lives begin to touch — friends, routines, plans further ahead than next weekend.
Most confusion and most pain comes from being at a different stage from the other person without either of you saying so. Someone can be warm, attentive and physically affectionate in stage two and still not be moving towards stage three. That is not necessarily deceit. It is usually that nobody named the stage.
You are allowed to name it. Asking "what are we doing here?" is not needy and it is not a rule violation. The unwritten rule is that you should work it out by inference; that rule was written by people who find inference cheap. It is not cheap for you, and you do not have to pay for it.
For the rest of this programme we will treat dating as a process with visible steps, not a code you failed to crack. Nothing here asks you to be less direct, less literal, or less yourself. Directness is not the problem being solved. Ambiguity is.