Her first message to me contained the word 徐々に – gradually – and I've spent three dinners honouring it.

Yuuka is 28, works for a property management company in the city, and wrote a profile so apologetic about her own message-handling that I nearly skipped it. I'm new to this. Work is in its busy season. I may miss messages. Sorry. It's a strange thing to advertise. It's also, I've come to think, the most honest profile on the app, because everyone misses messages and she was the only one who said so.

Her reply, when it came, was the one I've quoted back to myself since: thank you for such a careful message. I'd be glad if, from a first meeting, things could progress little by little. 徐々に. It's a word that does a lot of work in Japanese. It says yes, and it says not yet, and it says I've decided the shape of this and I'd like you to follow it. I followed it.

The first dinner was in mid-August, and she told me within twenty minutes why she was there. She has an idol. A small one, an underground one, the kind who plays to eighty people in a basement in Akihabara and sells cheki at the merch table afterwards. Yuuka goes to everything. She has the ticketing apps, the fan-club tiers, the tour dates in a spreadsheet, and a monthly outlay that a property management salary was never designed for. This is 推し活, and it's the most sensible reason for being on the app I've heard: not vague "for the future," not "to have fun," but a specific, recurring, joyful expense that needs a specific, recurring, joyful income. I asked which one. She showed me. I've since watched two videos and understood nothing, and told her so, and she laughed and said that's correct, you're not supposed to.

The second dinner I put my arm round her waist walking to the station, lightly, the way you'd test a floorboard, and she leaned in rather than away. That was the whole escalation of the evening. 徐々に.

Then Taiwan. She went for a long weekend, and so, in the way of a small city pretending to be a big one, did Risa, on the same days. I spent a few minutes imagining the two of them at adjacent tables in a Ximending night market, comparing notes on the same Englishman, and concluded they'd have said the same thing: nice enough, good dinners, hasn't pushed. Which is either a reputation or a problem, and the third dinner is going to tell me which.

I asked her, from Hong Kong, whether Taiwan's air conditioning was as brutal as it is here. She said she was fine, she was heading home, she'd write later. She wrote later: back safely, thank you very much. です・ます, three dinners in. Risa dropped it after the first dinner; Hina dropped it after one coffee. Yuuka hasn't, and I've been trying, gently, to bring it down a notch, because the polite form is a distance and I'd like to know whether she's keeping it or just hasn't noticed it's still on. 徐々に applies to grammar too, apparently.

It's on the 19th, wrapped around a gig, which is not ideal – I've learned what a gig does to the evening after – and it carries the ask. I'll send it a few days out, in her own vocabulary. We've moved forward little by little and I'm glad of it. On the 19th, after dinner, I'd like the evening to be ours, if you would. Her word, handed back. She set the pace; the pace has arrived at this point; the only question is whether she'll agree that it has.

If she does, it'll be the least surprising yes on the Board. If she doesn't, she'll do it nicely, and I'll still buy her the cheki.