DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I (female, American, lives in the US) have developed a flirty friendship with a guy (German, lives in Germany), whom I met at a conference about a year ago, when neither of us were single, but now we both are and it’s pretty clear we’re crushing hard on each other. I am going to be visiting him in the next month or so, and I’m planning to stay for a week, and I would like to let him know (assuming the chemistry + feelings of emotional safety are still there in person) that I think he is wonderful and adorably hot and I would be very touched if he wanted to be something more than just friends.
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But! I am planning on staying in his tiny apartment, and I really don’t want to make him uncomfortable or feel like he can’t get away if the answer is no and he needs space for a bit, and I don’t know what the most comfortable way to bring this up would be for him?
Also, I am an adorkable demisexual nerd with only one prior relationship under my belt, which I did not initiate, and the idea of saying ANYTHING is making me want to bury myself in a giant hole from lust-filled shame. Help?
Foreign Affairs
DEAR FOREIGN AFFAIRS: If I’m being honest FA, I would’ve wished that you had your own place to retreat to for this. While I can appreciate all the reasons why you’re staying with him – hey, getting a hotel is pricey, staying with a friend frees up money for fun times! – it can make things a little (or a lot) more awkward if things go wrong.
I say this because I have been there, done that and had s--t go wrong. Having stayed with a friend I had feelings for, but who didn’t have feelings for me, meant that I found myself in the profoundly uncomfortable place of needing to get away from it all and not be dead-bang in the middle of an emotional situation that I really didn’t have the tools to manage at the time. It was entirely down to my discomfort (and thanks to the transitory property of discomfort, her feeling uncomfortable because of how I was feeling), but it still wasn’t a pleasant experience. Not having a place to go to let things burn off, even just overnight, made it all a lot harder and ultimately I ended up cutting that leg of the trip short. If I’d had a place to go so I could at least spend a night ugly crying and get it out of my system – and not leaving my friend in the position of feeling (incorrectly) responsible for me and my baggage – it would’ve made things easier to bounce back from.
Now having planted that seed in your already anxious brain, let me point out that my crush was very emphatically one-sided and I was aware of it at the time. My staying with her was an attempt at a Hail Mary pass, the wish that I could make s--t happen through sheer force of will and desire and got smacked by the gods for that particular bit of hubris. I’ve also had the opposite happen: a friend came to stay with me and now we’ve been married for twelve years. It can go both ways.
You have a mutually flirty friendship and apparently a mutual attraction. That plus close quarters is a pretty solid setup for something to happen. What does happen is going to depend on the two of you. And what I would suggest is that, rather than leaving things up to fate, you should grab fate by the ears and actually try wrestling it in the direction you want to go. Which is a very poetic way of saying “FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT’S HOLY, DON’T WAIT UNTIL YOU’RE IN A FOREIGN CITY WITH NOWHERE ELSE TO GO TO SAY SOMETHING TO HIM.”
Here’s the thing: part of the reason why you’re worrying about this is because everything is currently unsaid. You’re pretty sure, but not 100% sure that this is a mutual thing and you’re hoping that something will happen but the idea of saying anything makes you want to jump in a hole and pull it in after yourself.
You know what makes that a thousand times more awkward? Trying to have that conversation face to face, with no preparation, and when the stakes are a lot higher.
If you were someone who was confident enough in yourself and your game that you were willing to roll the dice and take your chances – as I was with the friendship that lead to marriage – that’d be one thing. But you’re not. So I’d suggest that the best thing you could do is stop leaving things unsaid before you get on the plane. Do yourself a favor and call the question NOW. Lay it out for him so that you two won’t have to deal with any possible fallout that would take away from your mutual enjoyment of the trip.
Write out what you want to say first, so that you aren’t trying to freestyle it at the worst possible moment. Knowing what you want to say in advance makes it so much easier, and writing it down helps get your thoughts in order and keeps your brain from running three steps ahead of your mouth.
It doesn’t need to be flowers and poetry. In fact, I’d recommend keeping it fairly simple and straightforward. You want something along the lines of:
“Look, German Friend, I’ve been crushing on you for a bit and it feels to me like you feel the same way about me. If it’s the case that you’re feeling about me the way I’ve been feeling about you, I’d really like to explore the possibility of something between us while I’m in town.��If I’m entirely off my nut, and it’s certainly possible I am, that’s absolutely fine; I love what we have now and I wouldn’t want to give it up for anything. But I wanted to bring this up now so that if I am wrong, we can power through the awkward now and we can focus on just having a good time while I’m there.
So that’s where my head’s at. How about you?”
Then you give him that message. If you’re both better at text, then email it to him and do your best to not break your finger refreshing your inbox. Yes, you want to email it rather than text it or send it via DM; the last thing you want is to see either the read receipt of those three dots just bouncing for hours.
If you’re better at expressing yourself verbally, give him a Skype call without video so he can’t see how hard you’re blushing.
Will it be awkward and embarrassing to bring this up now? Probably. But it’s a lot easier to do awkward and embarrassing when you have an ocean between you and days to weeks to get over any potential embarrassment and turn that into excitement, than it is to have those bottled up feelings churning in your gut while you’re 30,000 feet over the Atlantic.
And here’s a little secret from someone who’s been there and done that: it’s uncomfortable now because you’re not used to expressing yourself like this. But speaking your truth instead of keeping it bottled up gets a lot less awkward the more you do it and your confidence in doing so goes up with the practice.
Trust me: getting into the habit of expressing yourself instead of keeping things inside and just hoping that it’ll work out by magic will make this and any future relationships a hell of a lot easier.
So do yourself a favor. Bring it up now when the stakes are lower and you’ve both got time to push through any awkwardness – and you can push through it. As a certain general once said: “be afraid, but do it anyway”. Then you can let those butterflies go from “oh god what am I going to say, what’s he going to say” to “Ooooh what are we going to be doing?”
And then send me a postcard and let us know how it all went.
Good luck.
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Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com