"I really don't want to talk to you. Ever." "Wait, did I miss something?"

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, last year I met a girl at a Halloween party and was promptly bitten by the crushbug, so I asked her out to a related event two weeks later and got turned down for reasons of prior obligations.

I ask her out twice more, getting the “prior obligations” thing again, and I figure that I’ll give it one more shot and then just give up. I’m on a pretty good writing streak lately, which I credit at the time to this girl, since it started up on the BART ride home from said party. Later I find out that this is coincidence (or close to it), but for the moment, creation and infatuation are very closely tied together, so I write a less-bad-than-expected poem to ask her out again, get her permission to do this crazy thing, and BART across the bay one ungodly early morning to deliver it to her.

Well, it gets a reaction, though not exactly the one I wanted; it takes her a while to figure out how exactly to approach things, and then I get the Friends Talk. :smack:

Okay, friends are good to have, but I understand how these things work; I tell her that if she’s just trying to let me down easy, she doesn’t have to; if she means it, I’d be honored. She says she means it.

I’m pretty happy with that. Life progresses normally for about seven months. I get over her, figure out how this writing streak is happening (I neglect to tell her this; she said she was flattered and I saw no harm in that), and carry on platonically. We talk once or twice a week over AIM where I generally do the things I do with most of my online friends: offer help with essays when one is pressing, share stupid stories, hear stupid stories, offer a sympathetic ear when things are going to shit, crack generally bad jokes, and so on. Typically, I send her the first IM, rather than the other way around, but a mutual friend tells me this is not unusual. When this mutual friend comes up to hang out for an afternoon, she comes along, so everything seems okay.

Until the other day.

Around 1:00 AM (we’re both nocturnal-types; this is typically about an hour or two before bedtime) she dropped me a message, saying she was bored, and in about ten or fifteen minutes devolved into her telling me never to speak to her again. I’ve since determined that it really was her and not someone stirring up trouble for whatever reason. As far as I can tell, there are four things that annoyed her so much she couldn’t stand me:

1 - Attempting to maintain a mildly polished writing style, especially over instant messaging, is highly abnormal and mentally unhealthy. I do this, mostly as an exercise to keep myself in shape for other writing, therefore I sound like I want to kidnap her.
2 - It’s really creepy to write not-quite-bad poetry regarding girls you’re infatuated with. I’ll admit it’s a little cliche’d and juvenile, but I’ve never been able to write in meter before, and it’s a really neat little toy to play with. Creepy though?
3 - I’m not allowed to use the word “übermensch” unless I speak fluent German, “le mot juste” unless I speak fluent French, or any of those other colorful phrases that I’ve duct-taped into my working vocabulary; I should use their clumsier English equivalents. On the other hand, it is perfectly kosher for her to use the Japanese “totemo” instead of “very”.
4 - The idea of wanting to have an interesting relationship with someone prior to eventually having sex is verboten; obviously I must want to sleep with her first. Full disclosure: this was, of course, a desired eventual-outcome; to me, at least, she is all kinds of hot. However, a desired eventual-outcome is not necessarily a primary goal.
However, for whatever reason, despite the fact that these things send her into The Rage™, she waited seven months to tell me off. Apparently I should have been more clueful and left of my own initiative.

So, on to the questions: Did I miss something? Did I read way too much as a little kid and get stuck thinking in the wrong century? Do I sound like one of those “pittable Nice Guys” (eep!)? Maybe some of her complaints are valid, but not others? I admit to a fairly high degree of your standard-issue geeky social ineptitude, but I didn’t think I was that bad. This is all highly confusing.

2

1, 2 and 3 are matters of opinion and taste. I use a pretty formal style on IM as well; complete sentences, umlauts where appropriate, the whole nine yards. If poetry and foreign phrases really are the best way to express something you’re thinking, and you’re not just using them to sound superior, then go right ahead. And anyone who doesn’t appreciate those things doesn’t appreciate you, either.

On number 4, I’m not sure I follow you. Are you saying the interesting relationship is verboten by her standards or yours? And after seven months of chatting once or twice a week, weren’t you already well into the “interesting relationship” phase of being Just Friends?

3

On first blush and without any other information, she sounds like a flake at best, a head case at worst. I mean, c’mon, many literate people sprinkle their vocabulary with well-known foreign phrases because they run across them in [b[literature**. +, m4ny 0v uz d0||'7 5p33k 1337, and never will because it is juvenile and an abomination. And why wait seven months to tell you this? Unless she got bored with you?

I met up on-line with an old girlfriend a few years ago. Big mistake, and part of that was due to the fact that I was educated and somewhat read (she wasn’t) and could hold my own in a discussion. She, on the other hand, was into the narcissitic “dig me” thing, and saw me as a pompous windbag. I preferred to talk about things in a semi-literate style that may have put her on the spot (damn, I feel so bad about that :rolleyes: ). She ultimately wanted to “do” things. I see this girl in somewhat the same light. She didn’t get what she wanted in the first five minutes of IMing you, and then spent the next ten extracting herself from a tight spot.

To be honest, I don’t think you missed much. Tell your hormones you’re sorry, but they’ll get theirs sometime in the future. To me, she didn’t sound like she was worth much effort.

Vald/Igor

4

Let’s see… in order:
If poetry and foreign phrases really are the best way to express something you’re thinking, and you’re not just using them to sound superior, then go right ahead
I treat messageboards and IMs more or less identically, so you have a decently-sized writing sample to work with. After enough time spent tinkering with sentences in essays and hobby-writing, writing in this voice just comes naturally to me. Once in a while, I’ll get worked up about something, and my sentence structure grows more parallel and colorful imagery starts creeping in around the edges. That’s about the space of it, though; if it sounds “superior” I don’t intend it that way. It’s… just my voice. It came out that way. I don’t know any different.
Are you saying the interesting relationship is verboten by her standards or yours? And after seven months of chatting once or twice a week, weren’t you already well into the “interesting relationship” phase of being Just Friends?
She’s convinced that the only reason I could have wanted to go out with her was because I wanted to sleep with her.

Me, I was happy with things where they were. Now I’m just confused.

She didn’t get what she wanted in the first five minutes of IMing you, and then spent the next ten extracting herself from a tight spot.
Well, the next hour and twenty minutes, if that’s valid. Then she stormed off. I think she was trying to provoke me, but I wasn’t in a particularly provokable mood.

Thank you both for the reassurances.

5

These are the two things that stand out to me. You say you accepted being just friends with her yet you continued to write poetry about her and held out a hope of sleeping with her? I’m thinking she was picking up on this and got tired of feeling hit on. Bu, of course,t none of us have actually seen the actual content of the conversations, all we have to go on is what you’ve told us.

6

No, no. I’m sorry for not making that clear. I wrote other stuff, because… well… it’s fun. It’s a creative rush. I do it anyways; in the beginning, I was writing about her because I was coming out of a slump and I was focused on her; after the Friends Talk I just picked up projects that I’d abandoned before the slump and kept chugging along.

Progressing along the relationship chain to sleeping with her was a desirable outcome while I was trying to date her. After the Friends Talk, well, okay, I would still consider it desirable, but in about the same way as I would consider it desirable to invent a time machine and sleep with Joan of Arc. It wasn’t something I considered likely or worth pursuing, at least not consciously.

I don’t think I have logfiles outside that last conversation, so I’m afraid I can’t give you that much primary source material. That’s a little annoying; if someone could tell me what I’m doing wrong, I could work on fixing it. :smack:

7

Oh, one of those. Just fucking RUN!!!

–Cliffy

8

If a guy that I was being “just friends” with was writing me poetry, I’d say it would border - if not on creepy - on “oh shit, he’s pushing the boundaries.”

9

Ehh… you know something that I don’t, don’t you?

I wasn’t, though. I’m pretty good at staying shifted once I know where I need to be. Once just-friends happened, I took a small break, went back to my old writing projects, and that was the end of it. Near the beginning of April, when school was giving me a little breathing room, I sat down and transcribed some of the unfinished things I’d written to the computer and burned all the originals, just because… well, it felt right, cathartic and closing somehow. I haven’t actually created anything for her since January, but I suppose you could count that, still three months ago. Maybe it’s just… a really delayed reaction or something?

10

The kind of flake that’ll blow you off with “prior commitments” 5 times in a row is the kind of flake that’ll screw you around like that.

11

I want to tell you what a great person you are for not flaking off after she told you she wanted to be friends. Kudos. Right now she’s not acting like she wants to be friends, which kind of sucks but it happens sometimes. Either she’s having a bad day or she really means it. If I were you, I would try to email her or call her in a few days and act like nothing has happened. If she still gives you the cold shoulder, focus on your other friends. Such a great guy as yourself must have tons of friends.

Oh, and kudos also on the writing thing. Write whatever you want, who cares if it’s poetry. It’s really hard to get yourself out of a writing slump. Don’t try to suppress your creativity.

12

Are you perhaps involved with a catgirl? Does she wear fake cat ears? Does she use Japanese words and phrases inappropriately? If so, then I echo Cliffy’s advice to just run. Unless you can get her spayed first.

13

Her Netname isn’t Vivian Darkbloom, is it?

14

(bolding mine)

To hell with that. If someone tells me she never wants to talk to me again, I can take it. She’s wouldn’t be the first, and probably won’t be the last. But if she doesn’t mean it, or if she changes her mind later, then it’s up to her to make the effort to let me know that. She can try, but I’m going to want to know why she said what she did. Maybe we can work out whatever the problem is, but there’s no way that I’d act like nothing happened.

15

I agree with Cliffy and Enginerd… forget her, she’s nuts, RUN!

16

I think she’s full on psychotic, if you ask me. Stuff you see on IM is just the tip of the iceberg. Shit, you got out lucky.

You don’t have to ask out someone who likes you more than once or twice. Keep trying, and keep writing!

17

I don’t think you missed anything. Off the top of my head I would say that she has decided that she is not attracted to you and has sort of made up reasons in her head. She may not even be aware that she has done this.

If she had a big crush on you, those foreign phrases that you use would suddenly just seem adorable. KnowhutImean?

You’re just fine and you sound interesting.

18

Thank you! But… uh… maybe my naiveté is showing, but why would I? A girl worth dating is worth having as a friend; it seems perfectly natural to me.

If this is not normal guy-think, then maybe this makes a degree of sense; maybe she figured that I would disappear, or not be happy just-friends and leave eventually; when this didn’t happen, obviously the process needed a kickstart.

It’s a possibility.

No, she’s not a catgirl, though I’ve dated one. She was a delightfully intelligent, very widely cultured girl, actually, though I won’t argue if anyone says she was in the vast minority, a particularly rare and precious specimen.

I’m going to say that I don’t believe that she’s crazy, but instead that I’ve done something to offend her, something that I can’t pin down and can’t bring to light, no matter how much I’d like to. Maybe it’s just one of those conflicts of fundamental values that nobody can really address, because there are so many unspoken assumptions beneath them. I don’t know; I try not to look back in anger, but to think well of people I’ve cared about. It does me no good to think poorly of them.

Still, as Enginerd says, she made her call, and I’ll respect it. If she gets back in touch with me, well, forgiveness is a vast thing, but understanding is a pure good, and I’d like to know what happened. Until then, I’m not losing too much sleep. There’s an old Chinese saying that you can walk with a friend for a thousand miles, but eventually you have to part. Some times “eventually” comes sooner than others.

The big reason that I posted this is to try and figure out whether I’d done something, something obvious and avoidable, to cause this. If there is, I can correct myself and avoid things like this in the future, and that would be a truly wonderful thing. It’s looking less likely, though, at least less obvious.

To everyone who came in and offered suggestions (and everyone who may come in later), thank you. Thank you very much. I mean that.

19

This is true, however a lot of men are not mature enough or confident enough in themselves to pull of this sort of relationship. This is the classic “Nice Guy” relationship. The friendship is a way to maintain contact with a person they cannot otherwise have, it poisons the friendship. The girl winds up feeling like she has a stalker rather than a friend. You had a crush on her, that is a BAD place to start off a friendship. All sorts of feelings and emotions get dragged in. I’m not sure that had anything to do with this, but it could be hard for you to know since it’s not intentional on your part.

Let’s go over the timeline, and I’ll throw in my long winded and wildly inaccurate assessment.

You asked her out 3 times and got “prior obligations”. This is a red flag. People are not normally this hard to get together with. With me, 3 times and you’re out. She’s not interested. Your 4th attempt was definitely not the way to go. If you get shot down 3 times, it’s not time to escalate the situation to poems and BARTing over to her place early in the morning to hand deliver it. She called it creepy, I’m inclined to agree, at least I can see where she’s coming from.

Now, notice that she let you ask her out 3 times and would only claim prior obligations. She refused to just blow you off. This is indicative of a person who has a hard time with confrontation. Her “friend” talk was just another attempt to avoid confrontation. You had just travelled all the way to her home with a poem, she’s going to tell this doe-eyed puppy dog to piss off?

My opinion, the thing you did that upset her was… not going away (though I doubt the poem helped). From her perspective, she could be telling her friends:

She didn’t exactly deal with the situation well, but that isn’t uncommon. Instead of dealing with you straight up from the start, she let the situation grow uncomfortable until she wound up getting nasty to get out.

From your perspective, this is not easy. I’m making all sorts of wild assumptions, you are in the trenches. First and foremost, learn how to distinguish a real schedule conflict from a blow off. If the person wants to go out with you, it is not hard to schedule a date. You can also ask them when they are free for coffee or dinner, and they will actually tell you. If you get hems and haws on that, I can almost guarantee they ain’t interested or have some issue with going out with you.

Second, lay off the poetry. At least, go light on the poetry. Breaking that bad boy out on a girl who’s been turning you down for dates is a creepy / stalkerish type of move. Poetry is about emotion and feeling, writing poetry suggests you have strong feelings for her, and you’ve only met her once at a halloween party? It’s way too familiar at that point.

Third, with an IM based friendship, especially one where it got off on a rocky start, it can’t just be one sided. I’ve never felt good about people who I’ve always needed to contact first. Especially if we’re talking once or twice a week, that’s a lot of chatting without the other side initiating. This is at least a yellow flag, something to watch out for.

I will say this, 7 months is an awfully long time for someone to carry on with an unwanted friendship. There might be something that you don’t even know about that escalated the situation from tolerable to intolerable.

20

To figure out whether you’ve done something wrong or offensive, etc., we’d need to hear the girl’s perspective. While there certainly may be something like objective truth in the world, when it comes to human interaction, it’s all about subjective perspectives. And I think Cheesesteak’s hit it on the head.

May I hazard a guess that the light of your life is young, early twenties at the oldest? She doesn’t want to be confrontational and can’t figure out why you don’t get the hint when she turns you down three times. (Incidentally, if you ask a woman out, and she claims a prior commitment, and doesn’t offer an alternative, she isn’t interested. If, on the other hand, her response is along the lines of, “Sorry, I’m busy Friday night, but I’m free the following Wednesday,” then she actually wants to go out with you.)

So chalk this one up to experience, and walk away. Remain friendly when you see her (with all your mutual friends, it’s bound to happen), but don’t continue to pursue her even as a friend. At this point, it seems as if she is unable to distinguish between romantic pursuit and friendly pursuit, so while you think you can just be friends (because, after all, that’s what she told you), she’ll see further overtures as “Why can’t he get the hint!?!?”