I think he really secretly adores me,

but is just uncertain how to approach me properly.

...the most powerful and influential women in the world (and lastly, the mother of Napoleon) had just to thank their force of will—and not their schoolmasters—for their power and ascendancy over men.  That which inspires respect in woman, and often enough fear also, is her nature, which is more “natural” than that of man, her genuine, predatory, cunning flexibility, her tiger-claws beneath the glove, her naïvete in egoism, her untrainableness and innate wildness, the incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires and virtues.  That which, in spite of fear, excites one’s sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat, “woman”, is that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of love, and more condemned to disillusionment than any other creature.  Fear and sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in the presence of woman, always with one foot already in tragedy, which rends while it delights...

The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother.