When my last boyfriend and I broke up in August, I was pretty sure that I would never find another guy that I liked as much as him. I’m aware of how absurd that sounds, but on paper we were the “perfect match.” I admired his humor and his intellect and we had so much fun together…when he wasn’t breaking up with me once a week for whatever reason.

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It’s been an extremely long six months since then, and I hadn’t met a single person that I was interested in–for anything–during that time. And then, of course, you wake up one day and you do. You like someone. It feels nice to not feel as though The One That Got Away was it for me and that everything is downhill from there, but now I remember how I actually don’t know what I’m doing. How do you get a date? How do you let someone know you think he’s cute without coming on too strong and risking too much? How do you know if he likes you too?

We’ve basically been in training for these situations since the age of 11, but when I was thrown into it all of a sudden, it felt like I had never flirted with anyone in my life. There I was, at a group dinner with this guy I’d only met once before. I found myself thinking he was funny and I couldn’t even look directly at him because I was so nervous. I do remember very vividly what the wall behind him looked like, though.

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It would be difficult to exaggerate how poorly I handled the situation. At some point, he opened my car door for me but I became so flustered that I thought he was opening it for himself, and I jogged to the other side of the car to let him have that seat. “I was opening that for you!” he shouted. At our next stop, he tried again and I got my boot stuck between the door and the car.

Later in the evening, he went so far as to brush some lint off my shoulder. I blushed deeply and became so entranced by my own confusion about whether he was flirting with me that the table fell silent for a solid fifteen seconds. When is lint just lint and when is it “I want to touch more than your lint?”

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When we parted ways, all I got was a stiff, one-armed hug. We have no plans to see each other again and I still don’t even know if he’s single. I have no idea if he’s remotely interested but I’m sure that I am. And you know what? That in itself feels good.

Nikki Metzgar is a writer from Texas. She thinks the best first dates don’t include sit down dinners, but can’t help but be impressed by flowers. @nikkimetz

 

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