Dear Dish-It,
I have a crush on a boy in school and I REALLY need to tell him that I love him because there is a party that I want him to be my date for. What do I do?
MGA
Dear MGA,
First of all, don’t tell him you LOVE him. I know what you think you are feeling right now is love, but it’s not. Love takes a long time – sometimes years – to really form. The most important thing about love is it’s only real when the other person loves you back. So don’t tell him you love him – it is a recipe for disaster.
You need to understand that guys work and think and feel differently than girls do. Girls are very emotional creatures. We like to talk about our feelings and we like to listen to other people talk about their feelings. We love it when people we care about tell us how they feel about us. Guys are quite the opposite, in most cases.
Of course guys have emotions, but they do not need to express them verbally as much as we girls do. In fact, talking about feelings with anyone can be very hard for some guys to do. So instead of being all intense and dropping the “L” bomb on your crush (which will most likely scare him off), you need to act cool, calm and casual and sort of try to approach this dilemma as if you were a guy, too.
What I mean by that is if a guy wants to ask a girl to be his date to a party, it may make him nervous to do so but once he decides to go ahead and do it the way he does it is very casually. He doesn’t admit all his feelings for her in one go. He may even pretend that he just wants to go with a friend to make the situation as easy and stress-free as possible.
If you really like this guy and you’re not willing to wait and see if he will ask you out first (which will happen if he likes you), then I suppose the best thing to do is to ask him (and only him – not his friends, not through your friends, but directly from your mouth to his ear) to go to the party with you. Do it calmly, and don’t make a big deal out of it.
The one thing you need to be prepared for if you decide to do this, though, is the fact he might say “no.” So please remember, there are plenty of fish in the sea. You are young and this is not the last boy you’ll crush on. Also, you’ll go on many other dates to many other parties with many other boys before you find your true love, so don’t take his rejection badly if it happens. You’re still a great girl, and it’s really his loss.
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