Yeah, how you ask and how they answer has a lot to do with it. I wasn’t like “do you want to go on a date and be my girlfriend?”. It was more like “hey, want to grab some lunch today?”, or “hey, want to go for sushi Friday?”, or “want to meet for a drink tomorrow?”. They were all pretty open ended questions, asked in person. You definitely have more opportunities when you know someone IRL than when you’re just asking a stranger on the internet. It turns out that she always liked me, but was dealing with some personal tragedy when I started asking her, so the timing was just wrong. Once she was somewhat finished dealing with that, she said yes, plus we had gotten to know each other better during that time.