Unless she is dumber than soap or has the social skills of feces flinging monkey (both of which do not sound like desireable dating partners), it isn’t believable that she didn’t know it was a date.
She was put in an awkward position where she felt she needed to accept, she went, her way of letting you down before your expectations for “date” turned into “relationship” was to let you know she didn’t see it as a date by bringing one.
I have a similar story from the other end. When I was in college a guy asked me to a concert. I said no, I wasn’t interested. I may have told him I had reasons - I had a boyfriend at home, had another at college, and didn’t need to add a third to the set. I went out of town (with another guy with whom I was just friends back to his hometown - he may have been holding out for something on the whole “nice guy” thing, but if so, he never let on - I’m still in touch with him thirty years later - we are both married with kids - so its been a pretty good long term friendship). When I arrived back on Sunday “nice guy” was camped out in front of my dorm room. He still had the extra ticket and didn’t want it to go to waste. So I went - it was really awkward. Fortunately, he dropped the whole thing - I think he determined that my friend and I had something more serious going on and he’d simply been the victim of bad timing. :rolleyes: I did hear about him trashing me for going home with my buddy when we had a date :rolleyes:
Or the other possibility is that I was utterly (metaphorically) romantically invisible. Everything I saw at the time, and stuff I’ve learned since, tells me that was the case. I’ve had better luck since, and I did say that was my most extreme example; but I also remember what it’s like to be in that situation, and it sucks.
I do know of 2 men who were both decent guys doing nothing wrong but their women both just up and left them. Their is nothing worse for a guy than after doing everything “right” like being a good provider, being faithful, always helping out, not being abusive in any way, providing affection - she goes and finds someone else.
Then I know another guy whos x-wife left and divorced him because her friends pressured her that she was too good for him and she could find someone better.
So yeah their are alot of very bitter single men out there who get frustrated when the media just shows men being the baffoons or the bad people of society when they really are something else.
Those two things are absolutely not mutually exclusive. I really don’t mean to make you feel even worse, but the long and short of it is that yeah, you made several big mistakes. We don’t really know if you waited too long to make your move or not. We’ll never know that for sure. But bringing a coworker flowers on valentine’s day was definitely coming on too strong.
Nobody is ever going to tell you with absolute certainty that she didn’t realize it was a romantic date, but I think you should accept Dangerosa’s and AngelSoft’s opinions that you’d practically have to have some kind of a clinical diagnosis to not realize your intent.
Did you notice AngelSoft didn’t even directly address whether the woman understood your romantic intent? I’m pretty confident from reading her post that she didn’t even consider that the woman was unaware or misunderstood it.
Especially on the job, where every five minutes a different person will be asking you who gave you the flowers. How can you get out of that situation without looking “evil and heartless”?
This is why I mostly lost interest in the thread. So many nice guys actively fight against any advice that is given, and try to argue it away or discredit it, or treat different people’s experiences as though they come from one hive mind and so discredit each other. Trying to craft helpful advice when the recipient is just going to fight it and throw it aside to keep on with what they’ve been doing isn’t generally a fun activity.
It’s perfectly possible that you BOTH waited too long and that when you did make a move, you came on too fast and too strong. That’s actually a really common thing for Nice Guys to do, to sit around and say nothing for a long time (wating too long) , then jump into an over-the-top romantic gesture (came on too strong) and try to jump from ‘guy she kind of knows’ to ‘relationship’ in one go (came on too fast). But it’s easier to just decide that the advice is contradictory and use that to justify keeping on with what you’re doing.
Were you close enough to the women to get their honest side of the story? Whenever I’ve heard someone say their partner up and left for no reason, the partner’s story is often a bit different, at least to people that they’re not giving a bland non-answer to.
As to whether the incident represents some level of pathological cluelessness for the woman I worked with, it didn’t seem to. She had no trouble detecting romantic intent from other guys. Whatever the issue was that day, it was mine.
I seem to have graduated from invisibility to more normal levels of disappointment. I couldn’t tell you what the problem was back then, how there was this whole aspect of life that somehow didn’t apply to me, but I still say that I’ve been there, and it’s miserable.
Plus, it doesn’t have to be a “good” reason for it to be a valid reason. Maybe they were bored, vaguely unhappy or met someone with a bigger schlong. It happens. People have a right to go out and find their happiness where they may. They only live once.
You can do everything “right”, and the other person might still not like you as much as you like them. Yes, it sucks. But, yes, they’re allowed that. It doesn’t make them evil. It also doesn’t make you a loser, necessarily. Sadness is fine. Anger is probably misplaced and counter-productive. A sense of humor is recommended.
If the problem really is that you’re invisible (I think that matches your description), then the solution, or one step somewhere towards the general vicinity of a solution, almost certainly involves making yourself a more visible sort of guy.
With me so far?
So, never mind how you actually approached her. Too early, too late, too subtle, too strong. I mean, it’s interesting, but we’re not getting very far with that. We’ll stick a pin in it for now. And besides, if you were her version of Brad Pitt, it probably wouldn’t even matter.
So, let’s think “bait” rather than “chase”. What are you bringing to the table? How can you make yourself more visible? More interesting? More attractive?
I’m really not trying to be moralizing or bland in my advice. I’m just thinking practically.
Or are we just back to the beginning of the discussion again? A lot of women aren’t into beige accountants with zero personality. Yes. you’re more likely to catch their attention if you’re a guitar virtuoso and a snake wrangler. But I guess that’s the basic “nice guy” complaint.
I can identify with feeling invisible. Even being a decent singer/guitar player who performed in public often I never felt like I was ever being seen as a potential boyfriend. Snake wrangling never occured to me.
I’m learning the guitar, took a ballroom dance class, I curl, lived in Europe for three months, built a robotic Etch-A-Sketch, sailed on a tall ship to the West Indies, and make the best oatmeal cookies and apple pie you will have in your entire life. Even if you leave out the preceding stuff, I’m worth dating just for the baked goods.
When I read the character Gilderoy Lockhart in the Harry Potter books I figured Rik Mayall would be perfect to play him in the movies; but no, they settled for Kenneth Branagh.
My favorite singer, Marian Call, has a song titled Dear Mister Darcy. As she describes it at live concerts, its origins lie in Jane Austen and certain personal experiences. It is the true story of what happens when 2 nerds are attracted to each other. Nothing.
That sounds a lot like my romantic history, too. Although, I seem to be perfectly capable of those things even when I’m single, so maybe there’s no actual connection. When I think about it, I don’t actually recall seeing that relationships are advertised as combined hair loss cures and weight loss programs.
As for bringers of happiness, I guess they are advertised as that, but I suspect that it’s false advertising. Whatever it is I look for, and gain from, being in relationships, a net increase in happiness isn’t it. On the whole, I’m happier and more at ease when I’m single.
Doesn’t mean that I don’t want relationships, necessarily. There’s more to life than being happy. Sometimes we don’t go to the moon because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.
Oh, totally.
Tangentially related, and something that they never taught me in the Hollywood School of Romance:
For me, in practice, my most successful relationships have been with people that I wasn’t all that keen on to begin with. “She’s OK, whatever, I guess I’ll see how this goes.”
This is because I’m a much better person overall, much more pleasant to be around, and much more able to treat the other person as an end in themselves rather than as a means to and end, in that sort of relationship. I mean, as opposed to situations when I’m head-over-heels crazy about the other person. It’s when the rose petals are falling from the ceiling, and I’m drool-on-shoes infatuated, that I become an entitled, needy, neurotic, creepy little shit.
I had to explain this to a girlfriend once. She was complaining: “You weren’t actually in love with me when we first got together, were you?” It was a bit tricky to get her to understand that no, I wasn’t, but that’s a *good *thing.
And anyway, it wasn’t like I had pretended to be, or at least I don’t think so, so I’m not sure how valid her complaint was. In that particular case, she did the pursuing, not me. I wasn’t trying to selfishly take advantage of her. It’s the people that I *am *in love with that I try to selfishly take advantage of.
She still remembers me fondly (well, I hope), and we’re still on very friendly and loving terms. With her, I behaved like a more-or-less normal person. The people that I have been head-over-heels about are the ones who buy the pepper spray and think about restraining orders.
Now, I should make it clear that my partners in such “I can take it or leave it” relationships have not in an any way, shape or form been “second rate”. Quite the contrary: They are wonderful people that I’m proud and happy to have had, and to still have, in my life. I’m in no way talking about “desperate hookups”. There has to be *some * chemistry and mutual attraction there, or nothing happens in the first place.
I suppose you could say that, weirdly, I’m better at *loving *someone when I’m not initially in love.
(BTW, not that I’m necessarily above or opposed to “desperate hookups” either, in principle. I’m just not particularly good at those either, or capable of arranging one by design.)
It took a surprisingly long time for me to realize that this was going on, but these days, I mentally dismiss people that I’m initially crazy about as potential dates or partners just as readily as those I’m actively repulsed by. Or, as I put it in another thread: The Venn diagram of women I’m attracted to, and women that I’m capable of having successful relationships with, is really just two completely separate circles. OK, that is overstating it, but there is something to it.
Basically, I need someone who doesn’t make me lose my mind. I need to keep my mind cool, collected and somewhat disinterested for this stuff to work.
As I said earlier in this thread, there is a point where you cross from thinking that these thing actually make you attractive, to stubbornly insisting that they should make you attractive.
Which side of that fence are you on?
(BTW, one item doesn’t belong on the list: The fitness thing. Fitness isn’t a nice guy thing, it’s a bad boy thing. It goes on your other resume)
As I said earlier in this thread, there is a point where you cross from thinking that these thing actually make you attractive, to stubbornly insisting that they should make you attractive.
Which side of that fence are you on?
(BTW, one item doesn’t belong on the list: The fitness thing. Fitness isn’t a nice guy thing, it’s a bad boy thing. It goes on your other resume)[/
So it’s not ok to be nice and fit? I’d say distance runners may be nice as a whole. I was training for a marathon when I met my wife, and I don’t think the shape I was in hurt judging by the look she gave me the first time she mm saw me with my shirt off.