As far as platonic female friends, I have two, but they are bothon League of Legends (and I hardly play that game anymore). They did give me some tips and yeah female friends can be great. But I have none in real life. See part of the problem is that my high school is just full of cliques so making new friends isnt exactly easy. Any tips?
Talk to every girl you get a chance to. Even the ones you’re not interested in dating. Those cliques always seem so much more impenetrable than they really are. Be daring, take risks. High school IS the training ground for this, don’t miss out. It will only be more difficult when you leave school, if you haven’t bothered to learn to be at ease around girls.
Alright - it definitely wont be easy as I am shy, soft-spoken,and introverted and honestly would feel weird jist going up to a random table but I eill give it a try.
But man, pancakes3 is right. I fucked it up with her. I might have actually had a chance if I hadnt been so serious and awkward and weird about it. Now thay I think of it asking for her number because I want to get to know her better is just plain weird because it implies as if I am going to be chatting her up at night - which me and her are definitely not close enough for. I should have just made it more casual and asked her to a movie or something. Oh well - at least I learned something.
This is actually one factor of my different persona at home than from outside. At hone, I am a loud mouth and drive my folks crazy sometimes from how much and how loud I speak. But outside, I am a soft-spoken shy guy until I properly meet somene and know they are okay wirh me talking to them. And with girls, it takes me a much longer time to get to that point.
When I was your age, in (mostly) 1998, we had school directories. I suppose people could opt out, but it was pretty practical to be in there, and almost everyone’s landline was listed. As I occasionally got people’s cellular or other numbers not in the directory, I would write them in the margins. I got in the habit of taking my directories in the car with me, in case I needed to call somebody on the fly. In conversation with a friend many years after the fact, he told me that he didn’t consider it appropriate to initiate conversation (or at least the kind of conversation we’re talking about here) via calling a number from the directory without going through the formality of “exchanging numbers.”
I wonder if anybody else was in that situation… was it uncouth?
AU, it’s a good idea to do what you’re doing here. Also, it now seems unlikely that you’ll do anything like what I did at your age. Be thankful for that!
I would be severely unnerved if I got a call from someone I didn’t explicitly give my number to. I might make an exception if we were working on a school project together so they looked up my number to quickly give me a heads-up on something time sensitive and project-related, but I would heavily recommend against randomly calling someone who didn’t at least implicitly give you permission to call them.
Edit: I mean, there’s a certain level of gamble. If they only gave you their number (or email) for “strictly business” purposes, you can probably get away with a social call, but it’s a bit gutsy and you have to be prepared for them to not appreciate it. But if they haven’t given you their number AT ALL it’s just right out IMO.
I agree with Jragon; today, telephones and their numbers are considered very personal items. If a person didn’t give you their number, it’s not okay to call them. If you must, then lots of apologies and explanations are called for.
Which is kind of weird, when you think about it. Most of us grew up with our phone number published in a big book, along with our address, and updated at least once a year and handed out for free to every single household and business in our cities! Social mores relating to phones have changed a lot in 30 years.
My parents as of now also dont want me to have a car until I am 21 and are planning to pick me up from college ever week or two…and they want me to come and live at home after graduate school until I get married.
What do I do?
I just wont want my parents telling me what to do and controlling my life. I want to break free and be able to do whatever I want.
How should I (in the future) stand up to them?
Ok, no offense, but not having a car until you are 21? Wanting you to live at home after graduate school until you are married? I understand that you are only 16 now, so the latter is way down the road, and if you don’t have a job, then procuring money to buy a car is a near-impossibility.
What is their rationale for these wants? Also, once you turn 18 (presuming you can support yourself), they can want all they… well… “want”, but that doesn’t mean you have to give in.
Honestly, I think the first step is to understand why they have these desires. Have they told you? Also, and this is just my opinion, YMMV, I think it’d be very difficult to court / marry a woman when you are living at home up until your wedding day.
In certain cultures, this is the norm. You’re under your parents roof until they arrange a marriage for you, set you up with a dowry and push you out of the nest. (OK, perhaps exaggerating a bit.) The Western/American idea of slowly branching out on your own as an independent person is frowned upon - you exist to benefit the family until you have a family of your own to benefit you.
No real advice for the OP except that once you’re 18, they can’t really stop you from getting a job and moving out. When you can support yourself, the power balance in the parent-child relationship shifts dramatically. They’ll figure out pretty quickly that they can either pretend they have no son, or they can learn to work with the one they got. Most parents opt for the latter, but it might take a while.
Yeah, I’m familiar, but I guess I just expected a more (for lack of a better word) “Western” approach to matters, because although is of Asian (Indian?) heritage, he’s mentioned that his family isn’t “traditional” in the sense that they marry for love, as opposed to arranged marriages, among other things. It just seems like an odd mix of values - “we want you to find someone on your own to marry and be in charge of your own destiny, but we also don’t want you to have a car until you are 21, come home and stay here every weekend while you are in college, and live at home, post-grad school, until you are married…”
I understand they don’t want him to grow up too fast, but it sounds like they don’t want him to grow up at all. Anonymous, just out of curiosity, are you an only child? If not, how many siblings do you have, and are they older or younger?
You need to accept you’re going to make mistakes and learn from your experience instead of beating yourself up. You will make other mistakes, you will miss out on other opportunities. You are not working on a deadline here and you are not under pressure. And to be honest, no, you probably did not have a chance here. You said she never starts a conversation with you no matter how often you talk to her, so she probably wasn’t interested in you in the first place. Sorry. You could have done better in approaching her, but you probably didn’t blow it by asking the wrong question. It’s just not a match. So dust yourself off and move on.
I think it depends on which country you live in and what the predominant religion is there.
For example, if the predominant religion frowns on young people keeping company when they are 16, then maybe you will have some problems or maybe you will get stoned if you do it.
By “stoned”, I don’t mean that you will get drunk or take drugs. I mean the kind of stoning that we see in the bible where a crowd of people all pick up a few rocks and then throw them at someone who is chained to a post and keep throwing them until the victim is dead.
I have thought about that and believe it would be a very unpleasant way to die. So, I would not admit to having a gf if it meant that I could get stoned as a result.
I don’t have a job right now, but I am planning on making a few hundred bucks this summer, next, and the one right before college through internships and summer jobs. In college, I am also going to try to find a job 20 hours a week - something like that - I don’t know.
I don’t know why they don’t want me to have a car until I am 21 - that’s just how Indians roll I guess. They think that most college students don’t have cars. But they, or even I don’t really know. So my question is, do most college students have cars?
I haven’t really stood up to them yet or told them what I want to do after I am an adult. I think if I make it clear by saying that I want to have freedom and be independent once I leave for college and just outright tell them that I will need a car for dating, working, and hanging out during weekends (I think they said I could date starting at 18 so I might be okay there) and be honest with them. Especially, because they know this too, my preference is to go to a college in a rural setting. I hate city life and honestly, being in Manhattan just for a day makes me depressed. So not everything is just “close” to you in a rural setting.
Next time we have a discussion about college, I will tell them all this and we will see what they say.
But you’re right, if I really want to, I CAN rebel against them once I am 18. The problem is, I probably won’t be getting any financial support from them if I do. Right now, they’re planning on paying for my college bills, phone, and food, and other stuff. But if I rebel, I must make damn sure I can pay for all that stuff (and more) myself.
Rebel gradually, bit by bit, as you gain more leverage. Never do anything too dramatic or drastic if you can help it. In fact, it need not seem like “rebellion” at all. The point is to prioritize gaining financial and other kinds of independence, and, as much as possible, give them no reason to infantilize (why does spell-check dislike that word?) you. If you act petulant, bratty, or anything similar, it will backfire. If you demonstrate maturity and competence, subtly or blatantly, it will open up some doors, and hopefully change some of the ways they perceive and treat you.
I found a technique that worked very well with my parents was to give them something to worry about that was contrived but that was far more serious and they then quickly abandoned the original issue.
It was amazing just how well that worked. It was kind of hard on them. But they were being hard on me and so I never regretted it.
A very effective area is religion. If you can get them to freak out about your doing something that threatens their religion, you might be able to then get away with all kinds of important things.
So again I ask, do most freshmen and sophomores in college have cars?
I dont care what type of car - all I need is a way to drive places and girls to places. Thats it. If I can do that, I am content with the car aspect of this issue.
When I was living on campus at a residential-based college in the sticks, most people didn’t have cars. But when I was living at home and commuting to the local college, there was no way to live without a car.
I don’t think you should at this point. Keep your hat on and let things cool for a bit. You’re still in high school.
No, today’s teens and young adults do not own or drive cars at nearly the rates we did. Another cultural shift. Car Ownership Not Popular With Generation Y | TIME.com
Okay, so you are saying I can date in college without a car? Even if the college is in a rural setting? Because if thats the case, then I should be fine.
I think it depends on what you mean by “date.” There’s no reason you can’t hang out on campus getting to know someone.
Most of the coupling I see in my young friends seems to bloom from group relationships. They “hang out” with a group of people and eventually they “hook up” and then they become “a couple”. So yes, this can be managed without a car. The old model of “ask a girl for her number, ask her out on a date, ask her out on another date, ask her to go steady/exclusive, get engaged, get married, have babies” seems to have fallen out of favor in the younger crowd. But it’s not entirely extinct, it’s just that there’s more than one way to do it now.
Relax. You’ll figure out the way that works for you, it’s just going to take some time. You actually do not have to have it all figured out this week. You’ve got many years to find the way that works for you.