Hi, Hope you are well.

I need real help please. Several months ago at university I made friends with a nice, sweet girl. I have since grown to care for her very much and feel like I am falling for her.

When her friends were around she talked to me like a normal friend, but when we were alone she opens up to me and talks to me about her family and marriage. In the last several weeks she has spoken to me about marriage so so much. I feel like she is trying to send me a signal/hint that she wants to be more than a friend? Would I be assuming correct?

I wanted to tell her in person that I have grown to care for her, so I went to see her the day before she left, she was very busy handing in her report work and now she has gone back home to a completely different continent 8 thousand miles away and I do not know what to do anymore. I had planned out the day and everything I was going to say to her in person, where I was going to take her.
She will be back here in 5 months time, but that is quite a long time away.

I have her on facebook chat and twitter, I really want to know if she has been sending me hints, but I dunno if I am assuming wrong and I don’t wanna make our friendship awkward, I care too much about her happiness.

Please help! From what I said above does it sound like she wants to be more?

Would it be reasonable to message her and ask her if she has been sending me hints or would it be better for me to say how I feel instead?
How would I go about doing that, without coming across weird, creepy, needy, cowardice?

Thanks very much for your time.

Regards.

YS.

 

Dear Awkward & Reasonable,
On my first day of baseball practice at the age of eight, our coach said the following to us. “Gentlemen, if I start you off on our first day of practice by hitting you the highest, longest, hardest hit balls imaginable then everything else from this moment on will be easy – relativity speaking.”

As an eight year old, I had no reason to doubt this smart man, especially since he used words that made no sense. True to his word, he hit us balls that traveled faster than bees and higher than clouds. I got knocked out cold in the first six minutes.

I’m drawn to tell you this Awkward & Reasonable because assumptions, like many Ashton Kutcher movies, only ever end badly.
Making assumptions means you believe things are a certain way based on nothing but a gut feeling which is good when it comes to helping an injured bird, avoiding Prince Ekwesili Mshelia of Nigeria’s mutual beneficial $7,000,000 business proposal, and posting racy cat photos on Facebook, but not so good when it comes to women.

Can you see how this might lead to trouble? This could cause you to base an important future decision on advice from a guy like me who assumed his high-cut-jean-cut-off-Daisy-Dukes-wearing, moose-knuckle-bearing, white-man-permed baseball coach had his best interests at heart. (Sometimes evidence trumps intuition, even when you suffer from synesthesia).

Better to base things on facts and what we do know:

  1. You need real help. (so do I)
  2. Water is wet. Fire is hot. Girls have cooties.

If you put #1 and #2 together it sounds like an Emily Dickinson poem written by a fourth grader.

When you’re around this girl and her friends she talks to you like a normal friend. I’m assuming this means you talk about clothes, celebrities, and bikini waxes. It’s great that you jumped into the Friend Zone and can recommend hair products to her, but the fine print from the Friend Zone reads like a relationship horror movie. None of the doors have handles, all of the windows are sealed shut and the only way out is to fake a near death experience which comes with an entirely different set of hard-to-read fine print rules.

In the last several weeks this girl has spoken to you about marriage so so much, you feel like she is trying to send you a signal that she wants to be more. New studies from Relationship University confirm that when a woman says, “Yes” she really means “Yes.” When a woman says, “Maybe” she really means “Maybe.” And when a woman says, “No” she really means “No.” I’d wager a bet that any conversation that you had with her about marriage, Star Trek and your obsession with Unicorns was simply a conversation about marriage, Star Trek and those alchemistic horned white horses.

I dated my ex for four years when I popped the question and when I handed her the ring, she looked at me like I’d just taken a poop on her carpet in another language. Don’t rely on signals unless you have some kind of rare Radarsat satellite DNA.

To cut to the chase Awkward & Reasonable, we have no idea if this girl wants to be more than friends with you because you failed to protect your delicate and malleable manbrain from the powerful influence of sugar and spice and everything nice. It’s turned many a puppy dog tail into a complete chicken. (I should know, I wrote an entire book on the subject) Had I asked my ex if she wanted me to ask to ask her to get married (women call this “conversation”) I would have saved myself a lot of unnecessary anxiety. To the manbrain this sort of thing seems infinitely more complicated and a lot less romantic, but it’s just the way these mysterious things in the relationship universe work.

My advice to you is to get your cootie shot booster (Take a pen, draw a circle on the back of your hand and put a dot in the middle of the circle while saying, “Circle, dot cootie shot”), dial her number and simply say, “Hi, how are you? I’m curious about something. I sort of like you as more than a friend and I was wondering if you feel the same way?”

Unfortunately, it’s weird, creepy, and needy to hold your feelings back when you’re interested in hanging out with another person as more than friends. The longer you let it go on the more weird, creepy, and needy you’ll appear. The sooner you get this question out into the open, the sooner you can move on with your relationship. Maybe it’s just friendship. Maybe it’ll be more than friends. Maybe you’ll date her for four years, you’ll pop the question, no one will poop on anyone’s carpet, you’ll get married and then you’ll both blog about this momentary and mutually confusing time.

In the end, if she says she sees you as a friend, don’t despair. Head on over to Netflix. I hear “A Lot Like Love” has a really great ending, Ashton Kutcher has great hair in it and (relativity speaking) it’s a great movie to watch alone or with a new best friend.

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Best known for his PBS Special and Off-Broadway one man show “The Neon Man and Me,” and a recipient of the 2012 United Solo Festival award for Best Drama, award winning storyteller Slash Coleman has been a featured performer at nearly every storytelling festival in the United States, dozens of universities, conferences, community art organizations and most recently in the NPR series, “How Artists Make Money.” The author of the “The Bohemian Love Diaries” (Lyons Press), a recent TEDx speaker, and a regular contributor to Storytelling Magazine, Slash’s latest work was published in Unstuck (Voyageur Press) and the internet dating anthology Robot Hearts (Pinchback Press). He is also a personal perspectives blogger for Psychology Today and contributes under the title “The Bohemian Love Diaries: How our Quest for the L-word Impacts our Creative Spirit.” Currently at work as the writer/host/producer of a second PBS special entitled “The New American Storyteller,” Slash currently resides in New York City and splits his time between performing and writing new material for the stage, film, and television.

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