Name change for this one.
Just want to get other people's opinions on this because I can be pretty dumb and blind when it comes to this sort of thing.
I know someone through work who I've only met properly once, but I've had to collaborate with him/ask advice by emails a lot. He friended me on Facebook a few months ago too and since then we've been more informal with each other (by 'informal' I don't AT ALL mean 'flirty' - I basically mean that we no longer say things to each other like 'thanks for your time' and 'kind regards' :D). He is very nice, friendly, and a family man - his FB page is covered with family photos, and he seems happily married.
A few months ago he said to me on FB (roughly), 'We should catch up for a drink some time'. I replied with (roughly), 'Yes, would love to'. This wasn't a private message or anything - the exchange took place in a long thread about something else, so loads of other people would have seen it. So, totally public etc.
Nothing was said for a while and then he emailed me about something work-related, in which he also said something like, 'Let me know an evening when you're free in the next couple of months so we can go for drinks/dinner'. I replied with something like, 'Any evening is fine except for days x and y'.
Weeks went by and nothing was mentioned, then in another work-related email, he suggested a couple of evenings and asked if I'd be free on either. I picked one. He replied with 'Great, I'll book a room to stay overnight' (he lives quite far from where he works).
Is this all perfectly reasonable and innocent? Am I signalling something to him by going along? I fear I'm overthinking all this, and it would seem ridiculously prudish not to go on the off-chance that he might be expecting something 'untoward'. It's just that over the course of this communication, he's progressed from suggesting a casual drink, to an evening meet-up involving dinner, then saying he's going to stay over (which is totally sensible given he lives far away, but then why mention it?). He also started putting the odd kiss in his emails, which again could be totally innocent, but ... ? And, in an effort to work all this out, I tried to imagine what he would tell his wife about this night out: 'I'm going to have dinner with a woman from work who I've only met once, and I'll be staying away overnight'. Which is a bit ... well, if I were his wife I'd raise an eyebrow.
But then, on the other hand, if he does have any funny business in mind, he has gone about arranging it in an unbelievably brazen manner (i.e. publicly suggesting it on FB then pursuing it in emails about other topics). And that makes me think that it's more plausible to think that it's innocent than that a seemingly devoted family man would be so brazen ...
Knee-jerk reactions please, people. Am I being a stupid fretting idiot? Or do I need to turn up with a chaperone? (That last bit is only half-joking ... there are colleagues I could ask along without it seeming too weird!)