You might want to make your tenses consistent.
Oh, who am I kidding.
Quite right. I’m not sure why I have trouble doing that. thanks.
I’m not sure what you implied by that. That your crusade agains illegal tense shifting is a futile one? 
I guess I mean that you are maybe not operating with a full logical complement on this particular mission, though you seem well-equipped otherwise.
If you give this to her and she responds positively, you should marry her.
Dude
You need some straight talk.
I’ll get flamed for this but I’ll take the hit for your sake.
Your odds at the moment now stand at 35%. From your comments, i see a 65% chance she’s not into you, and using you either out of boredom, or a play against the fiancee. But you do have a chance.
Four step solution :
1] Ditch the lame novella.
2] Google “Intellectual Whore”.
3] Get a girlfriend*
4] Never call her again. If she doesn’t call you in a month, you never had a chance anyway.
If she does, time for action. Tell her you’ve been busy. Get a girlfriend, I know that’s not easy, but if you can’t, MAKE ONE UP. (get you facts lined up first - hair color, job, hometown, etc). The fake girlfiend should not be a steady thing - you’re not in love - just “having fun” which will imply you are getting laid as often as you want. She knows now you don’t have an alternative to her, but in a month she’ll get curious, and when you have an alternative to her games, she’ll need to rethink her own position. Point is - if she is interested at all in you -which you’d know if she calls within a month - you have to present a confidence that life’s been hunky dory this last month, better than ever. Even if it hasn’t. No woman wants a guy who is sulking, or too weak to make a move. Women need attention and they can’t stand to be ignored. (flame on)
If she says she wants to go out for a drink or whatever, you need to say something like “Well, the fact is, I came to the conclusion that what you wanted and what i wanted weren’t the same, and I like you as a friend, but what I need more is romance, and that’s where I need to focus my time.” (be sure to use the word “romance” but pause before and after, so it is properly misinterprted as “sex”. If she still wants to meet up with you after that, you are golden. Her EuroBoy fallback has been eliminated.
This has worked for me, honestly, more often than not, and I spent years being the “friend” until I started being happy, confident, and willing to walk away. (Even if I wasn’t truly happy or confident - doesn’t matter).
You have nothing to lose. Worst case she’ll call and tell you she’s in love with EuroGuy, and in that case wish her well, and tell her you have to get going, need to go to the drugstore on your way to meet your date. But at the moment, you are being played like a fiddle, and you need to man up. You don’t want to be just a “friend” or you wouldn’t have started this thread.
The only way your sentence makes sense is if my story is so bad that it would be a miracle for her to like it, and if so, I better keep her cuz she’s the only girl who’ll ever like me.
Say it ain’t so!
What I need is sex with a hot chick. But I’ll settle for straight talk…
I am indebted to you.
That is wildly optimistic. My odds right now stand somewhere around 0.1%.
Ouch! I poured my heart and soul into that thing, and you call it lame? I am no longer indebted to you!
Hm. Most enlightening. I forgive you for calling my story lame.
I will do this. Starting from 3 hours ago. No more calls. No more emails.
A few people have given me that advice. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
All sound advice. Thank you. We’ll see if she calls. She’s proud and touchy. If she’s not capable of picking up the phone and apologizing, I don’t need her as a friend anyways. Nor as a girlfriend.
Her loss.
What does she have to apologize for?
She didn’t show up for a gym date. Didn’t call before or after nor return my messages. I called her the next day and she said she was not feeling well. It’s a psychological thing. She said she gets anxiety attacks sometimes and I know she’s seeing a therapist (and so am I, for depression). I assume these “not feelin well” episodes are somehow related. This is the second one she told me about.
Assuming this…episode renders her incapable of making a phone call or picking up the phone. If she was ok to pick up when I called her, 24 hours later, wouldn’t she have been ok to call me?
I was not as blunt in my conversation with her but I did make it clear that explanation wasn’t enough. She took it badly and said something like “if you don’t want to understand, that’s ok” then she hung up. I later emailed her this (I like emailing when it comes to sensitive matters so I can say exactly what I think):
I was quite pissed when I wrote it and I tried very hard to be as …soft as possible. I spent like an hour toning it down, making sentences into questions and so forth. It was NOT something I enjoyed doing because it makes me sound like…well…a pussy. And I can sound like a pussy ON MY OWN thank you very much! I don’t need the help.
I dunno. Maybe I lack perspective. Is my email too harsh, really? If she had been another one of my friends, my email would have ben much more…colorful and assertive.
Anyways, I’ve stopped talking to her. We’ll see what happens.
Wow.
Men - Women relationship are probably the single most complicated thing in the whole universe.
This is all a “simple” incident, yet there is no clear consensus on wether she likes you or not.
Go with the flow man, whatever happens, happens…
Now you have the break-up, without ever having had the relationship.
She is pulling your chain, and you never had a chance at a decent BF-GF kind of thing. One or two nights of sex, maybe - whatever it took to get and keep you on the hook. That was the point of the “bring a bottle of wine” and “bring me chocolate” incidents - she was going to give you a taste.
She will probably try some other stuff. Run away.
Regards,
Shodan
I think you’ve just been buried beneath the passive-aggressive female equivalent of a ton of bricks.
Keep flailing if you want more bricks.
Excellent post, ChuckForbin. Sometimes you just have to call people on their manipulative bullshit and go your own way.
Couple of examples:
Some friends of mine were “friends with benefits” for a long time. It was really on-again/off-again, with no real commitment. A number of times the man asked the woman to marry him, and each time she turned him down in a sort of wishy-washy way. She didn’t know, she wasn’t ready for a commitment, etc. Then one day she walked into his house without knocking, as usual, to borrow a cup of sugar or something. She found him in bed with another woman. Suddenly she was ready for a committed marriage.
One woman I dated years ago sat me down for a talk once. She was bored with us, was sick of just hanging out (which is funny – she was constantly dragging me to plays, concerts, movies, and other stuff), and thought it was time for us to take a break and see other people. During a lull in her giving me my temporary walking papers, she went out to the store. When she got back, I was gone. She called me later that night to see how I was, and could we talk some more. Instead of being all weepy and relationshippy, I told her (truthfully) that I was involved in some activity and man, was I ever having fun. She asked me to come back over to just hang out. No thanks, I was having way too much fun on my own. And I told her that she was probably right about us. She BEGGED me to come over. I refused. The next day, she finally convinced me to see her and when I did, she jumped my bones like the wanton nympho that she wasn’t.
The conclusion I’m forced to is that women hate it when you have fun without them. As manipulative tools go, it’s one of the best. 
fimy
A couple of days ago you said you would confront “Wanda” and tell her what you were thinking. Now you are planning a passive surrender, apparently based on people telling you this woman is bad news. None of these people has any more idea than I do of what’s going on in her mind. We don’t know and you don’t know. Don’t jump to any conclusions. The main thing is to avoid screwing up something that might be good.
There are two risks here. One is that you actually have a chance and you blow it. The other is you get bogged down in a hopeless pursuit. Here’s what I would suggest.
You wrote a story for her. I and some others thought it was a very good humorous story. Others didn’t like it. My sense is that if Wanda actually has any feeling for you at all she’ll like it whether other people do or not. If she thinks you’re a jerk, it doesn’t matter whether she likes it. So give it to her. You’ve got nothing to lose.
Before giving it to her, tell her that while you enjoy her as a friend you are primarily attracted to her as a woman. Tell her what you told us about why you like her - gorgeous eyes, great body, good mind, and big heart. (Compliments never hurt and these are all sincere.) But it doesn’t seem like she returns the feeling, so it’s time for you to move on. You’d like to keep in touch with her as a friend, but not as regularly as in the past, and by the way, does she have any girlfriends she would set you up with? Before you leave you give her the story. Then you stop calling her.
The ball is in her court. If she has any interest in you at all she’ll have to do some hard thinking about how to hold on to a relationship that previously she just took for granted. If not, you get on with your life. And who knows, maybe she’ll set you up with a girlfriend who’s really nice.
Or, people who don’t need people are the loveliest people in the world.
Straight up, yo.
Not that I need your validation of my observation. Oh no.
Does that make you horny?
my $.02 (from a married guy who enjoyed many a relationship in the past and was very honest and up-front in communicating with women)
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Lose that number - this is a hopeless situation, as it is not based on open and honest communication.
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Learn from this - never be in a situation again when you think “damn I wish I would have done/said X”.
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Speak your mind in the future.
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Don’t mourn her loss - if she had in fact responded to a move from you, she essentially is cheating on her BF/fiance. She is not worthy of you… you would only be hurt in the future when she cheats on you.
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If, after reading this you still have feelings for her, drive over and plant one on her when she opens the door. See where that goes, then follow 1-4.
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Become a member of the SDMB.
It may not be hopeless at all. None of us really know. But it will remain stupid if it stays the way it is.
Here’s the deal: Stop calling her. Find other fun people to hang out with. Make sure that some of them have nice breasts. Have a good time. Build a life for yourself.
One of two things will happen:
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She’ll snap out of her complacency and yump on your yiminy. It’s a good outcome.
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You’ll never hear from her again. Which is OK, you’ll be busy whooping it up with other women anyway. Also a good outcome.
I love win/win. 
The best thing about doing fun stuff to make you more attractive to another person is that you start thinking about things other than “whether that person finds you attractive”.
And **that ** is attractive.
I once had a woman try her best to knock me near unconscious with a clue-by-four over this. I really liked her, and would try anything to make her like me. ANYTHING. Except for one thing – listen to her suggestions on how to make things work. She basically told me to get a hobby. Any hobby. Anything to capture my interest besides her. But no, she was my hobby.
Had I actually understood where she was going with that, I might still be with her to this day.
Never let it be said that love doesn’t make you dumb as a plate of goo.
It’s in her kiss, dude. Pay attention.
Ah, I found out late last night that she had called me back while I was at the gym. She didn’t leave a message, however. And she still has not answered my email.
Should I call her back? Should I keep ignoring her until she answers my email? Or calls me back again?
In other news, her BF gets here soon and they leave for puerto rico this saturday for a week.