easy to get.

When my friends would ask me for dating and relationship advice, one of my steadfast rules would always be to play hard to get.  Along with not going all the way on the first night, and meeting in a public place, I would always recommend playing hard to get because it makes you more tantalising to the other person.  Why shouldn’t you be chased a little bit?  And if they don’t make a little bit of effort in pursuing you, they’re probably not worth it.

That’s what I would say, anyway.  But of course it’s so much easier when you’re the person giving the advice than when it’s your turn to follow that advice.  There are two problems that I currently have with playing hard to get.  1) If you play hard to get and act like you don’t care (ice king / queen was always a good thing to me), they may also be playing hard to get and you end up drifting apart. Or they might end up thinking you genuinely aren’t interested and don’t care, which triggers unfortunate backpedalling on your part that comes across ultimately as a little desperate.  2) This time, I don’t even seem to want to play hard to get.

Call it laziness, call it hypocritical. But I’ve been talking to this guy for a few days now and it feels like we are fully into the flirting stage.  We already had some potentially awkward conversations about sex, relationships, family, jobs, money… and those have more or less been navigated without a hitch.  The fact that he is able to converse with me in a full and sensible way, without waiting around for me or texting me constantly suggests that he is both balanced and has a brain (which puts him above 80% of the people whom I have met in a potential dating capacity… usually the potential is not capitalised upon).  He’s attractive (take my word for it).  He is definitely who he says he is, and he knows that I am who I say I am.  We both seem to admit to having our flaws.  I don’t detect any hint of fakeness so far, we don’t agree on absolutely everything but we have a fair amount in common, which is realistic I guess.

And so I’ve spent the last 3 or 4 nights talking to him until 2am, which is something I only usually do with my closest friends.  I’m under no illusions that I haven’t even met him in person yet, so this can quite feasibly all come crashing down if we don’t mesh as well in person as we do online. But I’m also aware that it’s been a long time since the portents were so promising… we’ve grown to flirt a lot, and we talked about things I am not going to mention in polite company (that’s you, dear reader) and he ended the conversation with that kiss emoticon thing, and my “mwah” in response.  He was going to have a shower, he was going to watch a film and he ended up speaking to me the whole night and putting aside his other plans.

The best part of it (well, all the parts are good really) is that we were trading youtube videos of songs and apart from them pretty much all being romantic in nature (I slipped in Janet Jackson’s Warmth at the end because I am a tease and that is the part about you being polite company and that’s all I’m going to say about it at this point 😛 ), we have the same taste.  This is such a rarity, I am honestly over the moon!  We diverge on a couple of things (he played me this dance chipmunk version of Belinda Carlisle’s “Summer Rain” which was atrocious, but sorta funny; for some reason he is not into Ciara that much) but generally we agree.  Here are a couple of the things he played me:

And here are some of the things I played him:

See what I mean? All sexy and romantic songs… I recommend listening to the ones that I chose in particular (hahahahaha!). 😉

Usually with my friends I end up drawing them to my music taste (I got both of my best friends to fall in love with Danity Kane), but in this case it may not even be necessary, as long as I don’t hear any more chipmunk music. I know I’ve inspired two of his msn usernames in the past day, and I’m even prepared to go back to this atrocious club I swore I’d never set foot in again, only because that’s where he fancies going.  Hard to get has more or less gone straight out of the window, and I know that I need to be careful but at the same time we still get on with our own lives.  Like I literally just spoke to him now (as I was writing this) and we had a brief conversation (he is redecorating his room) and then he was just like “Gotta go / have a good day / xx”.  The “xx” is very important (you shouldn’t need me to tell you!) but I find it so refreshing that he makes the effort, but still has his own life.  Like I said, it’s about having a balance I think, and I find it reassuring that we haven’t fallen head over heels for each other, because that would be a bit unrealistic and dangerous at this point.  If you asked me, I would still recommend playing hard to get and not being available the whole time, because I believe that normally that is the best approach (hypocrite alert! I know, I know). But at the same time, it’s nice to have someone to flirt with, something that looks so genuinely positive, and even if my policy of hard to get is going out of the window on this occasion, at least I’m having fun.