I’ve never been on a date. Technically. Turns out, though, that sometimes the guys I thought I was just having coffee or lunch with as friends thought we were on a date.
But in my mind, it wasn’t a date because I was never asked to go out with them. The ladies reading this will know what I’m getting at. These days, a guy almost never asks, “Will you go out with me?” or in any other way clarifies if the get-together is officially a date.
Instead, guys show amazing creativity in the ways they navigate around actually asking the big date question. We women have to translate lines like, “We should meet up some time,” “I’m going for coffee, you want some?”, “We should hang out,” or my favorite, very close to the real question: “If I were to ask you out, what would you say?”
This avoidance leaves us ladies having to constantly decipher what the guy really means. We’re in doubt about his interest level or intentions. And, if we want to keep the relationship in the friendship category, we have to untangle the mess of undeclared meaning before we dare agree to anything (or we go along with the assumption of friendship and have the mess explode in our faces later on).
I’ve noticed this trend of avoiding the question has bled over even into marriage proposals. A lot of men these days seem to have trouble even straight-out asking a woman if she’ll marry him. But I’m not man-bashing here. Because the reason for this extreme avoidance is something most of us also have. It’s fear.
To be exact, it’s the fear of rejection.
We women are guilty of this, too. Perhaps in relationships it doesn’t look the same because we’re more willing to risk our hearts and pride in that situation. But in other scenarios? Not so much.
To read the rest of this post and learn how you can beat the fear of rejection, click here to hop over to my friend Emily Conrad’s blog! I’m delighted to be celebrating the launch of her debut novel, JUSTICE, now available in paperback! So please click on over to visit me there and find out how you can stop being afraid of rejection…