You have a number in your head, and I would guess it is high, and it is not the number of times he has thought about you, which nobody can count, but the number of times you have thought about him since breakfast. Is he thinking about me as much as I think about him is the question people type when that number has started to feel like a debt, and the honest answer is that nobody can tell you, and that the comparison itself is worth a closer look.
What I can say is that the two numbers are almost never the same, in either direction, and that the difference has more to do with who is holding the uncertainty than with who cares more. That is not a consolation. It is the mechanism, and knowing the mechanism gives you back a little of the afternoon.
Why the comparison is not a fair fight
Thinking is not a measure of feeling. It is a measure of unfinished business. The person with the less certain position in any relationship does more of the thinking, because their mind has a problem to solve and the other person’s does not, and a mind with a problem to solve returns to it at traffic lights whether or not it has been invited.
So if you are the one who does not know where you stand, the odds are that you think about him more than he thinks about you, almost as a matter of arithmetic, and that would be true even if he cared about you a great deal. The imbalance you can feel is real. It is just not measuring what you are afraid it is measuring.
The counting
Most people who ask this have started to keep a tally without deciding to, and the tally is the part I would take seriously. It goes once in the shower, twice on the bus, a long stretch in the meeting where somebody said a word that sounded like his name, and then the whole of the walk home. There is a sticky note on your fridge, in effect, with marks on it, and it is getting full.
Counting is not weakness. It is what a mind does with something that will not resolve, and it is worth knowing that the count goes up with uncertainty and down with information, which is why a message that says nothing in particular can cost you more than a week of hearing nothing at all. If he sent something dull and definite tomorrow, the tally would drop within days, and it would not be because you had stopped caring.
Is he thinking about me as much as I think about him, and the word for the thinking
There is a word for this kind of thinking, and I want to introduce it gently, because it is sometimes used to make people feel foolish and it deserves better than that. Limerence is the name a psychologist gave, in 1979, to the state of having one person occupy your thoughts for hours a day without your permission, with a great deal of rehearsal in it and a hunger for any scrap of evidence about how they feel. I have written about it properly in the limerence piece, and the short version is that it is involuntary, it feeds on not knowing, and it ends.
If the word fits, and you will know within a paragraph whether it does, then the question of whether he matches your thinking becomes a slightly different question. Limerence is not measuring him, it is measuring the uncertainty, and it would attach just as hard to somebody half as good, as long as he was equally unclear. That is worth knowing before you decide that the size of the feeling says something about the size of the connection.
What the question is actually asking
Underneath the comparison there is usually a plainer question, and it is some version of, am I the only one holding this. Is he thinking about me as much as I think about him is that question in different words. It deserves a real answer, and it has one, though not the one a search engine can give you. You get it by asking him what he wants, in daylight, and by watching what he does with the ordinary weeks afterward, which is about the only measurement of another person’s attention that holds up.
The is he thinking about me page draws one card for this, on purpose, and reads it for your side rather than his, because the cards cannot see into his afternoon and I would rather say so than sell you a number. If the thinking is about somebody you are no longer in touch with, the no contact version deals with the hour of the day when it is loudest.
What is yours in this
The hours are yours. I do not mean the thinking, which arrives uninvited and cannot be told to stop, but the checking that feeds it: the profile, the last seen, the mutual friend’s photographs, the drafts you reread. Every check adds a mark to the tally, and how often you check is about the only figure in this whole question that you get to set yourself.
And the sticky note is yours. I do not mean you can throw it away, because you cannot, but you can look at it in daylight, and looking at a count in daylight changes it. People who do this tend to find that the number is high and that it is not, most of the time, about him at all. It is about not knowing, and not knowing has a cure that a search engine does not sell.
What is worth doing tomorrow
Tomorrow, keep an actual tally. Put a sticky note on the fridge or use the back of your hand, and make one mark every time he crosses your mind before lunch, without trying to change the number. Then at one o’clock, look at it, and write next to it whether anything in the morning gave you new information about him or whether every mark was the same thought arriving again. Most people find it was the same thought, and that finding does more than any percentage a website could invent.
Come back and tell me the number, and whether it surprised you.
Clara