But what did he actually want?

As far as I could tell, he just wanted to reach out to someone and try to meet a new person on campus.

The whole time he was sitting there at my table, all I could think about was the “homework” I had to do while I was going through cognitive behavioral therapy for social anxiety: come up with a thing that sounds scary (for example, starting a conversation with a complete stranger) and do it, while keeping in mind the things you’ve learned in therapy (ways to calm yourself down, reasonable and observable goals, etc.) It looked to me like that’s what he was going through, but I really don’t know what his motives were.