If you don’t want to date someone, don’t. But it is not necessary to discuss their personality at length or dissect their thought when you are not interested in them.
Be kind in your response, but say no, as @Kindnessmatters suggested above. No need to give a reason why you don’t want to date.
I totally agree with this as a matter of technicalities (“If you don’t want to date someone, don’t… No need to give a reason
why you don’t want to date”). You’re right, there’s no law (or even social norm) requiring anything but a blunt “no” when someone asks us out for coffee. And actually, in general, it’s probably MORE polite to avoid giving a reason for a rejection (also it prevents them from arguing with your reason.)
That said, the reason I suggested such extra and flowery language is that the OP indicated a complication: she already agreed to meet him; she doesn’t know if this
is a date, and she suspects that if she flatly says she doesn’t want to date, he’ll redirect and say he was never looking for a date, just for a friendly coffee, which she verbally agreed to last time they met.
It’s totally true that no one is “owed” a flowery, gentle, easy-walk-through-guide through a potentially unpleasant conversation. That said, it’s been my personal experience (after years of conversations alternately intricate and blunt) that men are likely to respond badly to the brief, blunt rejections so many people recommend on the internet. And sometimes that can actually escalate into scary real-life situations. Whereas if we take the time to give someone
more than they’re ‘owed’, and create a conversation as gentle and sensitive to how they might benefit from it as possible (e.g. this man might benefit from knowing that his words have been interpreted as ‘racist’, or that his friendly overtures were mistaken for romantic interest – or at least he won’t be confused as to why someone first said ‘yes’ to him, then ‘no’ for seemingly no reason), we can smoothly work through to a much happier ending, where the other person continues to think of us well, even if we never speak again.
Again, I’m entirely offering my advice on the pragmatic level of “what will actually work and keep this as low-stress as possible for everyone”.
Quick PS, if the circumstances were different and he just texted to ask her out on a clear date, and they’d never spoken before and she hadn’t already verbally said yes to spending time with him, I’d be 100% with you on the same page of suggesting she just say a kind no, and avoid going into reasons (because reasons can be argued with, and she doesn’t want to invite argument). The challenge here is that she already said yes, and it’s not necessarily a date, so a simple ‘date rejection’ would probably feel jarring to him. Reasonably speaking, I think
some sort of explanation is required, for suddenly saying no to ever seeing someone again, after you already agreed to hang out with them in a friendly context (and will keep seeing across the room at Church for potentially the rest of your lives).
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. If the guy thinks it’s a date and you don’t, he might feel kind of embarrassed and hurt if he tries to kiss you and say you thought you were just there as friends. So yeah, just check in to clarify that he meant to go out as friends only, and if you are okay with that, enjoy yourself. 