I want to ask a guy out, but I’ve managed to become nervous about him saying yes. A no would be embarrassing. A yes because nobody else has asked him would be a different kind of embarrassing, with the added inconvenience of a date.
I’m 25, we go to the same university, and I have a crush on him. That is the established part. The rest is a fairly extensive collection of things I’m afraid might happen. I’m incredibly shy, and I’m about 90 percent sure the attraction is one-sided. He hasn’t rejected an invitation. I haven’t made one. My confidence in the result is doing very well without any actual result to work with.
I’m thinking about making a move at the end of the school year. Even that is still a possibility rather than a plan I’ve committed to. Putting it at the end gives the idea a place in the calendar, which feels slightly more organized than simply being scared. It doesn’t tell me what I would say when the time came.
What I keep wondering is how it feels on his side: being asked out by a woman he doesn’t find attractive. I can understand not wanting to date someone. What frightens me is the possibility that the invitation itself might make him uncomfortable, or that he might find the idea of me wanting him unpleasant. There’s a considerable distance between someone not sharing my crush and someone being disgusted by it. In my head, I seem to have misplaced the middle.
Part of me wants reassurance about that before I do anything. Preferably reassurance detailed enough to remove the risk altogether, which may be asking rather a lot of a question about another person’s feelings. I don’t know how he would react. I’m asking how men receive an unwanted invitation, hoping the answer might make my own invitation easier to contemplate.
Then there’s the reassurance I’ve already been given. Several of my male friends have suggested that men get fewer opportunities, so they’ll say yes to whoever asks them out. I’m sure this is meant to make the first move sound easier. It has mostly given me a second problem to think about.
I don’t want to be someone’s only available option. I want him to want to go out with me, rather than accept because an invitation has finally turned up. My friends’ broad claim can’t tell me what this particular man would feel, but it does make their version of a guaranteed yes sound less appealing than they probably intended.
So I’m still thinking about the end of the school year, and whether there’s a way to ask that would feel less awkward for both of us. Nothing has happened between the crush and the invitation yet. There is just a guy I like, and an opening move I keep trying to make completely safe before I make it.
