Richard writes about one of his policies:

When in a friendship with a member of the female gender, not only do I never ask if she's dating anyone, but they rarely ever tell me. I don't even ask new friends with whom I might feel a certain spark. The point is that I never ask the question, "hey, are you seeing anybody?". That's not because I'm afraid she'll say "yeah", because that way the pressure's off: I don't have to ask her out. I'm more afraid that she'll say "no", in that she's not dating someone, because I'm afraid that she'll ask as a follow-up "why do you ask?". I have no good answer to that other than a truthful one, and you know how that goes.

Richard seems to put a lot more thought into this part of his life than I do and that's why he's created a specific policy to deal with this; I haven't, but I recognize this feeling. Often when I travel I meet up with girls travelling alone and it's a weird dynamic after they happen to mention that they have a boyfriend back home. Doesn't it seem like I should be more comfortable? I would venture to say that it's a result of having either been seriously attached or Not Looking for the past, oh... 6 years. That's a while. And I still feel like I'm "in transition."

I have put some thought into policies recently, though. The way my last serious relationship went, it was like Chinese romantic Deng Xiaoping said: 摸石頭過河, "feeling the rocks to cross the river"; in the course of exploring a new way of relating to people, we both left a lot of things unsaid and ambiguous. I would like to think that I'm a little more experienced now, a little more willing to go to others for advice, and formulate some of my own policies. For example, I would consider DTR an important thing to do; if neither party is clear with the other on the current state of the relationship, unmet expectations and hurt feelings are bound to happen sooner or later.