On the boat with /u/crustang of this being real right now. Bear with me because I woke up at 5:30 this morning and went on a 7.5 mile thought-filled run this evening.
Some of you (especially on IRC/Slack) have heard me talk about wine/dawg girl. I came to the realization tonight that a lot of the way I've been handling this has been shaped by something that happened senior year of college. Basically a friend and I were fairly close but we were both pretty crappy at expressing feelings so I was kinda blindsided when all of a sudden she was with a mutual friend. They're both great people and they're still pretty close friends of mine, it just kinda shook me up for a while... and I think has influenced how I approached the rest of my senior year and now this spring here.
Before, I probably would have let this slowly grow or whatever. Thought I might be going to fast this time, but didn't want to risk the same thing happening. Ironically, both of these girls (and a bunch of other people) wind up at my place last week and thus how we arrived at the name wine girl... and oh look, it's wine girl's birthday this week. Good excuse to drop off a gift (guess what) for her. The idea was to actually take it to her, but that comes down to finding the 15 minutes or whatever that we're both here during the evening. Her lights were off, so I dropped it off with a note and it's jist is basically "happy birthday" and "if you want, I'll take you out to dinner before you leave town" (another reason for the acceleration of this).
Assuming the text woke her up a bit later or she was just chilling in darkness/another room, I get two responses. First, "Thank you, that was sweet" and like 10 minutes later (I don't respond in between these and probably won't until tomorrow because it's getting late here) "thanks for the dinner invite but i'm interested in just being friends". Now I'm listening to all those sappy country songs about being single rn mixed with some dopey 90s alt and trying to figure out how to salvage this. To put it nicely, I wouldn't be that surprised if she gets approached by lots of guys, so she probably has some decent experience in this area haha. I'm fine with being stuck in the friendzone and am glad she took it this well and didn't flip out (which I guess would have been a good dodge) or anything. I just need to figure out how to retract/recast this dinner invite as me being a dork or something, which I guess is for tomorrow-me to figure out.