Most of the Towson female population knows that when you are interested in a guy, you don’t blow up his phone, always ask him to hang out or seem too interested in him. It is text book to play hard to get; let him text, call, bbm, or [Facebook] friend you first. It’s also text book to seem a bit busy when he asks to hang out, flirt with other guys when he is around, etc. –they’re usually steps to make him work a bit and spark his interest in you.
What many girls (including some of my nameless best friends, and even myself) do not know is we shouldn’t play too hard to get. Guys will get disinterested after a short time if you don’t allow a few slips here and there from your façade. Sure, there are the brave few, who will text a girl for months and always be the one to start the conversation, but after awhile, it gets old.
Look at it this way- why do we pretend to be less interested in him than we actually are. Of course we like watching him get all caught up in his desperate attempt to woo us, but underneath it all- we are scared of rejection. We don’t want to seem clingy or desperate (who can blame us) so we hold off on getting involved with a new fling. We let him take the risk. There is nothing wrong with that; it is mere chivalry, they have done it since before Shakespeare went bar-hopping. It becomes unfair when we don’t give the poor sucker the slightest confirmation that “yeaaaaa, he’s alright.”
Men are just as insecure as women, if not more (Which I will argue they are, but we shall save that for another post). Meanwhile, here you are, gorgeous, charming, intimidating.
By all means, go ahead and make him text you first. Once you have gotten him to the point where he texts you first and has shown he is interested in getting to know you, meet him half way.
One girlfriend of mine wouldn’t even save her guy’s number in her phone (they had been hooking up at this point). How annoyed or offended would you get if every time you texted someone, they replied: “who is this?”
Another friend of mine has a similar M.O. A guy, let’s call him Jim, asked my friend for her number after seeing her out uptown a few times and something seemed to ‘click’ between them. Now my friend, Ann (name has been changed), is a traditionalist. She believes that the guy should do all the work, which is fine. She is a gorgeous girl and she had Jim texting her quite a bit. Every time they spoke, it was Jim who initiated the conversation. Now Ann liked Jim, and she would talk about him often; yet she would refuse when I insisted that, at least once, she send him a simple text first. He had clearly established his interest in her and she still felt the need to hold back from being the one to start a conversation.
One day Ann didn’t get a text from Jim. She wrote it off, but it seemed strange since he had been talking to her a lot. Then one day turned into two, then three, then four. Then the next time she saw him out, he seemed distanced from her. She found out, via your friendly neighborhood Facebook stalking, that he had started talking with another girl. Ouch.
I mentioned earlier that I was guilty of playing too hard to get. I was talking to a guy, and every time I saw him out on weekends, I would flirt with other guys in front of him. I finally realized that it was less intriguing and more upsetting to him, and I quickly wised up. That was a year and three months ago and we are still together.
Even if your crush is resilient, throw him a bone every now and then. If not out of fear of turning into Ann and Jim, do it to give the poor guy a break. Have confidence in yourself and let someone know how you feel about them. The worst that will happen is he won’t text you back. In that case, he’s not worth your time. Even so he will most likely text you back if you wait to see if he texts you first a few times. Who knows? It could turn into something great.