Randajad Posted May 15, 2011 Posted May 15, 2011 Hi! I've been wracking my brain about this for a few months or so and am starting to get the sense that, by thinking and reflecting on this alone, I'm just repeatedly hitting my head against the wall. So I thought I'd ask for your input and advice on this in the hopes of breaking my mental deadlock. There's a lot of ground to cover, so I apologize in advance if this post turns out looking more like a novella. When I was a kid, my family moved around Canada and the UK a lot due to my father's work. I became used to moving maybe once every six months. I got used to the other kids in school thinking of me as the "weird foreigner who talks funny". I didn't bother developing long-term attachments since I thought I probably wouldn't see any of my classmates again after a semester, or after a school year at the most. But, when I was 15, my family arrived in a small town (population 8,000) in rural Canada. On my first day in class, I developed a crush (the whole "love at first sight" thing) on a girl. We'll call her Kayla, for our purposes. She didn't seem to pay me much attention. She was a "jock", as the high school social stratification goes, while I wasn't really assigned any grouping because I was once again regarded as "foreign". I wasn't a pariah - I could interact freely with "preppies" and "computer nerds" and anyone in between - but no one knew what to make of me because everyone else in this community had grown up with each other over the past 15 years. While I found Kayla attractive, both in terms of appearance and in terms of personality, I decided not to make anything of it. After all, I had been moving once every six months all my life. I anticipated moving again. But my family wound up staying in this town for the remainder of my high school. My parents had decided that my younger brother and I needed the stability of remaining in one community during this point in our lives and our education. So, when those six months past and I found myself at the age of 16, I decided to ask Kayla out. I had been trying to hint at it in the leadup to posing the question. Teasing her playfully in gym class, fending off the occasional bully, complimenting her shoes, asking her to dance at high school dances, etc. My friends cautioned me that I was making it too obvious that I had a crush on her. Eventually, I decided it was time to come straight out, declare my affections, and ask her to dinner. I over-did it, presenting her with roses and a box of chocolates at the end of school one day. The stupidity of a hormone-crazed 16 year old guy. She was stunned, saying that she had never known I felt this way about her. She said that she would need time to think about it. Over the next 24 hours, I would spot her engrossed in debate with one or more of her friends, picking up snippets of the conversation that made it clear they were discussing me. I never heard much of it, but it seemed the camp was split 50/50. Some thought I was a "nice guy", the others insisted I was "so not cool" and ineligible to be in their clique. In the end, she turned me down. Kayla was very apologetic and seemed distraught by the decision, which made it all the more perplexing that I was rejected. Her explanation was that I just wasn't her "type" and that we were too different. In the end, she never wound up dating anyone during high school. Her explanation to a group of friends, which I over-heard, was that she was "saving herself" for "the right guy". Over the last two years of high school, we wound up having a peculiar relationship that veered between quasi-romance, friendship and indifference. We went on a few date-like dinners with just the two of us. We'd swap Christmas cards and attend each other's birthdays. One occasion stands out in my mind from my 18th birthday. There was a break in the middle of a class where we would sit next to each other. I jokingly asked for a "birthday hug". She always seemed to be apprehensive about physical contact with any guy, always placing a barrier of distance between herself and any of the guys in our school who had made it evident in some way that they she was attractive to them. She didn't hug me but instead, without a word, just took my hand in hers and held it until the end of the break. We sat that way, staring into each other's eyes, for several minutes. The mixed signals faded into what seemed to be mutual indifference a month or so later. I had grown tired of waiting to see if Kayla would be willing to resist what I saw as peer pressure from her friends to keep me at arm's length. I wound up having a great relationship with another classmate for the remaining months of the school year and the subsequent summer break before I went off to university. This relationship became long-distance as my girlfriend and I were attending universities in different parts of the country. Plus, my girlfriend's family had come to Canada from China and she was seriously considering returning to Shanghai to work for a few years after completing her degree. It was clear we had diverging life paths and broke up. From the age of 19-20, I had a few more relationships that I found fulfilling and interesting. Each wound up ending for fairly similar reasons to the one previously mentioned: my girlfriend and I would realize that we were both ambitious but that our ambitions were not at all mutually conducive. I had been single for a month (at the age of 20 and close to completing my second year of my BA) when I wound up bumping into Kayla on campus. We had fallen completely out of touch since high school and I hadn't known that we were studying at the same university. Slightly different programs, though. I was enrolled in the Honours program for Political Science, while she was pursuing an applied degree in Justice Studies. We decided to keep in touch and exchanged e-mails quite frequently over the following months but never met up again. About a year later, I decided I wanted to see her again. Maybe my irritation at the mixed messages from high school had worn off. Maybe I had recalled how I felt when I first saw her 6-7 years before. Whatever it was, I suggested that we get together for dinner. She agreed and we spent four hours that evening chatting and catching up. In the midst of the conversation, she fussed a bit about her appearance ("I need to lose weight." That sort of thing.) and I let slip that I actually thought she was even more beautiful than I remembered from high school. She also made the remark that she had only had some brief relationships in the past few years, that she preferred guys with a "strong personality" and that had unfortunately led her to be attracted to the whole 'bad boy' self-destructive tendencies of some. After that, we met up once or twice over the subsequent year. These get-togethers were infrequent, but we would usually go somewhere fancy, we both would be fairly dressed up, and we would talk for much longer than the waiters or waitresses at the restaurant probably would have liked. After graduating, I've been working abroad a lot. I've been involved with diplomacy and journalism, which takes me to places like Estonia or Montenegro for months or even a year at a time. She works with law enforcement. Whenever I'm back in Canada, we get together for dinner or lunch once and catch up in the same way. On my last return, she greeted me at the airport along with my family. She's still single and I'm finding that my long-distance relationships just don't work out in Europe - I'll date someone with the Norwegian delegation in Austria while I'm also in Vienna, and then I'll be re-assigned to Estonia and she to Venezuela for the next term. It just doesn't work. The trouble is that, given our long history together, I'm not sure if I am doomed to Kayla's "friend zone". Can she be attracted to me? After knowing each other for 10 years, though there have been periods where we haven't seen or heard from each other for vast stretches of time, I'm concerned that she can now only think of me as a friend. That being said, we seem to have built up a certain level of chemistry. In our last few get-togethers, the physical and emotional barrier has vanished. We greet each other and part ways with a hug, which would have been unthinkable in high school. She has confided in me certain family issues that she hasn't shared with any others to my knowledge. Even flirting seems to be back on the table. For example, in our last get-together, she showed me her new Camaro (which looks like Bumblebee, straight out of the "Transformers" movies) and I remarked that this would probably make me Shia LaBeouf, a fate far worse than death. She joked that it couldn't be all that bad - if I was Shia LaBeouf, then she'd be Megan Fox. Occasions like this lead me to question whether I'm in that friend zone or if these are signals that I am still seen as an eligible partner. So I am left with this dilemma. Is there a potential for a relationship? Should I try actively pursuing one? I return to Canada in a little over a month. As usual, we'll probably meet up again. This could be the opportunity to make the pitch, but I'm unsure. One idea that I have been considering, which is probably far too goofy and sentimental, has to do with her birthday. I'll be arriving in Canada exactly one week after, which means I'll miss it. But I thought I'd present a belated gift to her - a matryoshka (Russian doll inside a doll inside a doll, etc.) It would be meant to symbolize how I have come to know over the years the many beautiful layers of her personality, each layer more beautiful than the last. But it does sound an awful lot like a gimmick. The last time I presented her with gifts in asking her out - the roses and the chocolates 9 years ago - I was rejected and the gesture may have been seen as an attempt by me to buy her affection. Maybe it would be best to leave out any imaginative metaphors and show to her that "strong personality" she said she wanted from a man, saying right out what I feel and where I hope things could go between us. Any advice would be very helpful! If I have to spend the next month agonizing over this, I'll probably manage to drive myself crazy (if I'm not already). Thanks in advance!
guy777 Posted May 15, 2011 Posted May 15, 2011 High likelihood that this is friend-zone, but you should make a move on her to find out. If she's cool with it, then you can start wondering if it's FWB for her, or more. Just keep doing FWB as long as you can until she either ends it or brings up relationship status.
Recommended Posts