I think a month is not a very long time for a man or a woman to know where a relationship is headed, or to know where they want it to go.
I met my husband through a personal ad I placed. We taked on the phone several days before meeting.
The first date was kind of blah. He was more shy in person than on the phone, but I wasn't worried about there being no sparks, as I know sparks can develop. He told me that he didn't want to rush anything, and that if it didn't work out romantically, he'd still love to be platonic friends and do things together (over the first month he said that alot).
On our second date, we watched movies at his apartment. It went better, but still I was getting mixed messages from him. At the end of the evening, I hesitated at the door, kind of expected a goodnight kiss, hug, or handshake - some sign of romantic possibilities. He interpreted it as my wanting to spend the night, and said he wasn't ready for that and wanted to take things slowly. I laughed and told him that he'd misread the signal because I was NOT at all into casual sex (he still teases me that he still thinks I had more on my mind than a good night kiss).
We dated for more than a month without calling it anything (no kisses either). Finally I asked him whether we were "dating or what?" And he still didn't answer (turns out he had "you say it first" -itis). He told me that I was sending out mixed messages. At the end of a very long conversation we both decided to "see where it goes," and we were both open to it becoming romantic (and it did).
There are many legitimate reasons that a man or a woman might want to take relationship-building slowly. There are a lot of lame and even rotten reasons too (like maybe he's married or seeing someone else).
In our case, hubby was a bit gun shy from a very unpleasant previous relationship. He didn't want to rush things, because the last time he did, there were some pretty terrible consequences. The woman had children to whom my husband had become extremely attached, so the breakup had all the ugliness of a divorce, without any of the legal rights.
You need a lot of information that you don't have. Maybe he's not giving you a straight answer, because he doesn't know yet. A month is a terribly short time. If he's avoiding opportunities to get together in real life, and is communicating only in indirect ways, I would suspect the possibility of another woman in the picture (or man, if he's bisexual), or he could just be relatively old-fashioned or for some other reason wants to take it slow, or isn't comfortable declaring his emotions (which he may not even know at this point).
I'm not saying that you should stick it out, and I'm not telling you that you should, just sharing my story. My hesitant to commit guy did come around very quicky (we were married barely a year after meeting), so his feet couldn't have been that cold.
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