3 years back, I, 21M, was talking to this girl. We spoke a decent amount and after about 3 weeks or so I gave her a compliment and felt incredibly stupid afterwards (I wasn’t particularly socially/emotionally back then), so I got cold feet and removed her off of basically all social media instantly afterwards. This was, unsurprisingly, a pretty stupid thing to do and I’ve regretted it for a pretty long time and recently I’ve had thoughts about maybe making contact again.
How inappropriate would it be to try again? And if it’s not – how would I even go about doing it? Just ask what’s up and what’s been going on? It feels like no matter how I do it, I’ll look like a weirdo for trying to reach out after so many years.
Thanks in advance!
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There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s almost definitely going to end badly.
At best she’ll be distrustful of you as you’ve displayed a behavior she’s unlikely to want to deal with. At worse, she’s rationalized that you’re an asshole and will get upset or try to hurt you.
I doubt you’ll look less like a weirdo if you’re honest. You’ll have to take a bold step. It’s either you do or you don’t.
What are the chances she’s been wanting to hear from you?
I agree with others that the ship has likely sailed with this person, though there is no harm in trying.
Put yourself in her shoes. You’ve been flirting with this guy and he seems to like you and then, poof he’s ghosted you. Now, THREE years later he shows up out of nowhere and wants to pretend nothing has happened. Would you trust that?
If you want to apologize and explain that you had some anxiety you can try to take it slow, but don’t go in with any expectations.
I reached out to a girl just for a catch up 7 years after college, we were friends in college and I left half way through so it felt as though it was more on me to keep the friendship going as I left.
But I didn’t, 7 years went by without a word and one day I remember thinking “fuck it” and I messaged her asking if she wanted to grab a coffee and catch up, i was ready for no response a no or a yes, to my surprise it was a yes.
So we met up and by the end of walking and talking for 3 hours we both agreed it felt like no time had passed at all it was lovely.
We both said we wanted to see a movie that was coming out so i shot her a message when it came out and we went to see it. Again had a really lovely time with some chatter before and after the movie.
Now this is where things got more difficult, I ended up with a crush on her, dident ever cross my mind in college probably because I was with somebody and she had red flags I couldn’t look past too but now both of those blocks are gone.
I was aware she was “exclusive” with another guy and from what I could tell it was going well.
So I was left with 2 options, I tell her I have these mixed feelings/crush for her and face that embarrassment, potentially wreck this re-budding of our friendship or option 2, accept its a crush, accept shes with somebody else, feel the loss (getting over a crush is very much like a break up just smaller scale) but keep the friendship and anything that may come with that in the future.
As I want more friends in life right now and during our 3rd meet up she mentioned she would invite me to board game nights and to meet some of her other friends. Ive gone with option 2, now thats not very straight forward either, I had to accept the feelings of rejections without even being rejected, I had some tougher days that I had to go and visit family members to keep me busy. Im through it now and I find myself less concerned when sending her a message or caring so much if she replies, I of course hope she does but if she one day doesnt Ill know she doesnt want the friendship and thats fine there will be more friends in my future that ive not even met yet.
Tldr: be careful, you could be rejected straight away, you could have a great friend, you may have to deal with feelings.
A lot can come from reaching out but worse case is you get no response and really that aint any worse than your current silence with her so why not try?