Relationship Woes and Advice 25: Now with extra Valentine

[Crow]

If the intention on the part of the solicitor is for the dinner to be a romantic dinner, but you are not interested in a romantic relationship; you politely decline.

Doing otherwise just strikes me as fuzzily misleading and borderline exploitive. No matter how clear you are, if you go to that dinner, there is a high chance that doing so will cause feelings of confusion or even resentment in the person who asked you. At the least there will be some feelings of awkwardness. The person who asked the other out may even just be going through with it to be polite, having been notified there is no chance of the romantic relationship they had hoped for; and would rather move on.

The bottom line is that no matter how good of friends they are, one party fundamentally thinks of the other differently than they do. You can't just pretend that doesn't exist. This is the exact type of behavior that drives people to threads like this one.