How to not look like a stalker after you meet her

Ask A Woman:  Should you really wait three days to call after you meet her?

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Hello Beth

I met a lady at a bar one evening.  We hit it off right away and even exchanged a few kisses.  I asked for her email and she jokingly said “Here, you can even Facebook stalk me.”  I email her the following morning saying how it was a pleasure meeting her and that I’d like to “keep in touch”.  Then I follow up and send her a friend request on Facebook.

It’s been about a week now and I have not heard from her.  I was just wondering, did I break that 3-day rule of contacting her?  I thought that rule was non-sense?  Anyway, I would love your insight on this topic and I would also appreciate any advice as to what I can/should do next without being all stalker-ish.

– Justin

Hi Justin,

This situation sounds embarrassingly familiar…echoes of my misspent youth, sigh.  There are a couple possibilities that might explain what happened.  Here’s the first.  You mentioned that you met lady at a bar, you hit it off with lady, you and lady kissed, then lady ignores you for the next week.  My guess?  Lady was drunk.  Maybe she seemed fine, maybe she only had a couple drinks, but I would bet my favorite pair of red heels that she was, in fact, wasty.  The next day she woke up with a dry mouth and a slamming head, recalled meeting a nice man with whom she flirted shamelessly, remembered making out in public, and thought, not again.  Just kidding.  Actually, she probably felt like an idiot for being so forward, or maybe her friends gave her grief about kissing a stranger, or perhaps she even has a boyfriend already and your interlude was an alcohol-induced indiscretion.  So when she saw your email and Facebook friend request, they were reminders of what she perceived to be her bad behavior, and she ignored both, pledging to reform her boozin’, free lovin’ ways.

How “relaxed” was she?

Let me explain why I think alcohol is a factor here.  Women–despite how crazy, flaky, and fickle some men believe they are–do not go from having a pleasant evening to deciding they never want to speak to you again by the next morning.  Doesn’t happen.  Some event must come to pass in between to make them change their mind about you.  Assuming you didn’t leave out the part in the story where you follow her home, knock on her bedroom window, and then expose yourself when she lifts the shade, the other explanation, besides inebriation, is that your perception of the evening was far different from hers.  Maybe you thought it was lively conversation but she was merely humoring you; maybe you thought the kissing was full of chemical sparks but she felt nothing.  But, at that point, she shouldn’t have given you her email address, and her joke about Facebook stalking seems out of place (if she really didn’t want you to contact her, why put the idea of Facebook in your head at all?).  So I still think it more likely that she was drunk.

I don’t think it was wrong at all to contact her the next day.  Contacting her by two methods–email and Facebook–was probably overkill, but then again, she welcomed both by giving you her email address and mentioning Facebook.  As I’ve mentioned here before, “rules” about dating, like you should wait 3 days before contacting a woman, are extraordinarily archaic.  And LAME . Think how much simpler life would be if people who were romantically involved said what they meant and acted upon what they said.  If you like someone, you ask them out.  If you still like them, you call them again.  And if you don’t, you tell them immediately, and gently.  I hate, hate, hate this idea that the way to love or sex or a committed relationship or a fun fling or whatever it is that you want, has to be cloaked in games and mystery.

Advice from any guy who calls you “baby” is worth a 2nd opinion.

All of this is to say, Justin, you did nothing wrong.  I think it’s great that you met a fabulous woman, had a fun time with her, kissed her, got her email address, and then contacted her the next day.  I think it’s a bummer that she didn’t get back to you, either because she was embarrassed (which apparently there was no need for) or because she was dishonest the night before when she gave you her email address.

As for your next steps with this woman?  There are none.  She’s telling you she’s not interested, for whatever reason.  Don’t let that discourage you; move on to other (perhaps more sober?) women.

-Beth

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