Do you ever find yourself shrugging your shoulders and settling on the “boys will be boys” conclusion? Real Live College Guy Andy is here to show you that mature men do (in fact) exist. He has an uncanny ability to sort out the good guys from the bad apples and is here to bring you the best in college love advice.
I met this guy in my class who I really like, but he seems kinda shy. I started chatting with him online, and we’ve been chatting for three days, but he won’t even say more than “hi” to me in person. What’s his deal? – Stuck in Cyberland at Syracuse
Stuck,
To borrow an oft-used phrase in baseball, “trust your stuff.” Baseball coaches often tell their pitchers to trust their repertoire of pitches rather than be overly cautious on the field.
Similarly, my advice for being stuck in “Cyberland” is simply for you to “use what you’ve got.” This guy is more comfortable talking over the internet, so use it to your advantage. Talk over Facebook chat, Google chat, email, whatever he finds most comfortable. It sounds to me like you are in the early stages of dating this guy and clearly he is a bit shyer than the average fella. There is no harm in getting to know him online first. As long as he keeps responding and you have a good back and forth going over the net, there should be no rush.
These days all of us college students should be pretty good at reading the amount of “LOL’s” and wink faces in an online chat. If he seems excited to talk to you online, he is probably interested. And maybe through getting to know him better online first, you will get a sense as to why he may be shy talking to you in class. Perhaps he’s not as experienced with relationships as you might think.
When the time comes to move things forward, there are a handful of ways that should get him to hang out with you in-person without the added pressure of it being a formal date. First, just tell him you are going to be eating lunch at a certain spot on campus and tell him he’s invited to join you. Second, invite him to a party or ball game. You know, something of a group atmosphere where he doesn’t feel too much anxiety of a one-on-one. And if those don’t work, tell him you like him or tell him you think he’s cute, at least (but be careful: in the case of the latter, some guys can think a girl is just saying that to be nice).
In this particular scenario time is on your side. Since he appears to be shy in-person, you almost certainly aren’t competing with too many other girls for his affections. So for the time being use online chatting to your advantage. Heck, if conversation is going well ask him to Skype! But be careful! Have a reason for it (like, so you can show him something cool in your dorm room) as to avoid his feeling uncomfortable (as if it were a Skype “date”). It would be a lot harder for him to turn down video chatting if you have a really awesome snowboard that he would be interested in looking at up close.
If you follow these ideas I think you’ll get somewhere eventually. As the saying goes, patience is a virtue.