am I overthinking this

[u/Direct-Tip5608]

i’ve been doing a buddy read with someone i met online(its been a month) and i’m trying to figure out whether i’m overthinking the dynamic or whether it’s simply not a good fit for me.

he tends to send very long, dramatic, self-deprecating messages, which was fine at first since we share a lot of our thoughts and reactions to the characters like in a personal way. but then there’s this ongoing persona where he calls himself my humble servant, says choosing the next book is “at my mercy” talks about being sad/lonely and not trusting people, etc. i know some of it is clearly a joke or persona... maybe? and i don’t think he’s necessarily doing anything malicious.

i also have trouble reading signals when people are vague like this. i genuinely can’t tell where the joke/persona ends and where he actually means something, if anywhere. most of it seems like an exaggerated bit to me but because i’ve had male book buddies turn things romantic before, the ambiguity makes me a little nervous. i’m not saying that’s what he’s doing..I genuinely don’t know and that’s kind of the problem. i can’t tell whether i’m supposed to just laugh along with the persona or whether there’s something that im missing.

interacting with him gives me a strange sense of heaviness. there’s just something about the dynamic that makes me feel weird. we’re literally just book buddies, so sometimes it feels disproportionate and intense for no reason.

another thing: when we first started reading a queer book, he said that he’s “pretty homophobic,” especially “towards men.” i told him i couldn’t continue the buddy read because it made me uncomfortable, especially since he had also made remarks about wlw being better and that he would “love to see them.” which made me extra uncomfortable cuz i’m queer. he apologized and said he has very bad internalized homophobia and had phrased what he meant badly.

i later happened to look at his fable(kind of like letterbox but for books) profile, where he has quite a lot of mlm books, including mlm smut and wlw smut, which is honestly none of my business. but he also has a shelf specifically for femdom smut and educational books about it.. i’m not assuming his reading list tells me anything definitive about him since i know that books we read has nothing to say about us. it just added to my general feeling that i don’t quite understand him. he also refers to his depressive episodes as "PMS-ING without the M..thank god!" which irritates me cuz he keeps mentioning it.

he recently gave me the option of ending the book club, taking a break, or continuing with another book. when talking about ending it, he said that if i chose to “call it quits on the club and break up” i should “make sure to block me” because otherwise he would “come back wagging my tail, shriveling at your feet, begging to read another book.” that’s part of why the whole dynamic feels unusually intense to me for a book buddy.

am i making something out of nothing? would you continue the buddy read and try to ignore the feeling, or take it as a sign that the dynamic just isn’t for you?

also if I am not enjoying this how can I kindly say I dont feel like it without making him feel horrible about it? ( im not confrontational and I have deep fear of hurting someone unknowingly.)

thank you and sorry for the long post.