**Forewarning**: I had confidence issues in high school, I was a pretty big (as in fat) kid and was an offensive linemen. COVID did not help much with my socialization either, but I started to take the gym more seriously and have made a lot of progress from the previous gains from football. I went from an obese 220 to a chubby 188. I’ve done a lot of self-care and am happy with how much I’ve improved, but I get in my head a lot and forget I look nothing like the person I depict in my head. I do feel that I have trouble conversating with people other than friends and family. It is hard for me to keep the conversation going and keep people interested whether it be in person or by text.
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Hi, sorry for the long read in advance, here is my scenario:
Saw a really cute girl at my university’s diner during the spring semester. Kinda crushed on her pretty hard, but didn’t see her for weeks. Now, I have never approached a girl other than the bars and Tinder which is 10x more different when you are heavily intoxicated or impressing girls with a pickup line. Even then, out of all my interactions, I have only had one successful date from Tinder, and everyone else the conversations would go nowhere. Didn’t think much of it, but then my roommates who were with me told me they have been seeing her get off the 5th floor. *(Trust me this is an important detail).* They even started to encourage me to go approach her as well.
At this point, I knew that I wanted to go up and at least introduce myself and had a few chances, but never did due to a variety of factors:
1. Saw her in the elevator and in a span of 15 seconds was gone.
2. At the diner, she would eat alone with headphones so I never had the balls to interrupt her meal.
3. Finally, after weeks of not seeing her, I was ready to just give up it was my last day before getting kicked out by the school for the summer.
While lugging my friend’s heavy-ass fridge we walk past each other as she gets on the elevator as I step off to the main floor. I had a sudden feeling, seriously like a sense of urgency to finish helping my friend load the car and run back inside. After around 30 minutes, I catch her leaving with a cart of her belongings and I **HESITATED**. I reasoned to myself that she will probably need to take another trip and waited for her to come back in, which never happened.
I tried to not let it get to me but went through my yearly college summer break cycle: enjoy being back home for a little bit, and then get bored and a bit depressive. While on one of these days, I just happened to think about my last encounter with her and just couldn’t stop beating myself up for it.
But I remembered she was in the specific learning program at our university, which has an Instagram page that lead to us following each other on there. I then see from her bio that she lives on the other side of the country, \*sigh of disappointment\*, and decide I am better holding off til the next semester, which was another stupid decision.
Now I go to a pretty big school and have moved to an apartment further from the dorm. I don’t want to repeat my mistakes and have any regret. Would you guys recommend sending her a message? I don’t know if it will seem awkward as with the given timeline, messaging after following someone for months :/ or i might be overthinking it, who knows? What is something I can bring up to get a conversating going, other than “What’s ur major or where u from” and to transition the convo to possibly hanging out with her?
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Thanks for the help.
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Summary: i’m downbad
3 comments
I think it would’ve been a good idea to ask to sit with her while she was eating lunch. Ask her name, where she’s from, her program, etc. Say you have nobody to eat lunch with and if she minds company.
Edit: You could send her a message, or move on. There’s lots of fish in the sea.
Don’t overthink this. Introduce yourself, say you noticed her around last year but never had an opportunity to talk to her. Mention there’s a new movie you would like to see at the cinema and ask if she wants to go.
Worse case she says no. If she does leave it as that and say you understand, I hope you have a nice week.
If she says yea, the cinema is a nice non confrontational date. Meeet up buy popcorn, watch the film and afterwards have a drink and a chat about what you thought about the movie. Spend more time listening than speaking. Then start talking about each other.
Ok I didn’t need a fucking novel dude. Here is the thing. Every time you saw this girl your head came up with an excuse. You have been programmed to find excuses because a fat average guy should never mate with an attractive woman. Why? Because society needs to incentivize men to work hard and to perform to it teaches you that only good looking, rich, super athletic guys should have the confidence to get girls like that.
Since you don’t feel good about yourself you come up with excuse after excuse. You need to battle all of these excuses. When an excuse comes up in your head tell it straight on “this excuse is canceled. Next!” Keep doing that until your fear is decreased. And when it is decreased, look the woman straight in the eyes like you are Prince Charming about to make her the luckiest girl in school, walk up to her and say “Hi I’m Bob, what’s your name”.