Ask Women: Can You Tell When She Has Feelings For You?
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You guys may have seen our
AskWomen video series, where we got some real women to have some drinks and answer your
questions about whether a guy can ever get
out of the friend zone or whether size matters. Well, here’s a single
girl’s opinion on more of your questions. Check out her first column “Does Money Really
Matter?” Readers have been kept anonymous.Q: How can a
man tell when a woman has feelings for him? By this, I mean on all
levels, not only when a woman truly loves a man, but when she has a “crush” on a man, when
she has sexual desires for a man. One of my main issues with women has been knowing how
they feel as they typically are not particularly vocal about their feelings in the way
that men are.A: “People always say you should be
yourself, like yourself is this definite thing, like a toaster or something. Like you can
know what it is even.”This is one of the Angela Chase quotes I
remember most clearly from My So-Called Life — the one that I think most
directly ties into how I feel about love and its definitions. As a corollary
to this, and to sort of answer your question (emphasis on sort of), I think that
when you are in love with someone, you just… know. Every fiber of your being knows.
You look at them and are overwhelmed with a sense of… I don’t know, goodwill
seems a silly word, but also fairly accurate. It is newness intermingled with an
inexplicable sense of familiarity, wrapped in blanket of fuzziness and pheromones. That
being said, I guess what I mean is that there aren’t really totally universal,
completely specific signs (although much of the bits documented throughout time and
literature, like “butterflies” and “heart swelling” and so on seem
to exist in all people in love). But even though it’s not easy to pinpoint the exact
symptoms that indicate that you are in love (cue symphony and cartoon hearts shooting from
eyeballs), you do know when you are. It’s faith, not science, so even
though it can’t be proven, you still know. And if you don’t know, if your
whole being isn’t contaminated with this person, if being apart from him or her
doesn’t actually sometimes physically hurt, then it might not be love. The truly f*cked up thing is that people try to put parameters on this very unwieldy
thing. They try to assign it correct timing, as if it’s something you can pencil
into your Moleskine to arrive at an appropriate date in the course of a relationship.
Especially as women, we are taught that we are not allowed to be in love with someone too
early on in a relationship, because that makes us come off as crazy and scary. And even
men don’t want to seem like wusses or whatnot by dropping the L-bomb. Which is sad,
really.Imagine if artists and poets throughout time subscribed to this modern
day school of thought. If Romeo had just been “pretty into” Juliet or Jay
Gatsby had simply sort of admired Daisy in a noncommittal way, would those stories even
have mattered? Art is full of instances of immediate love, love-at-first-sight,
irrational, overtaking, crazy love. That’s what makes it beautiful. I think maybe what people don’t understand is that the love you feel in the very
beginning is amazing, but it’s not the same as the deep love that only appears after
time, and even this deep love continues to deepen and grow and change over the course of a
relationship. Or as my pal and fellow Cultist Jane puts it “I’m always
discovering new ways of being close and intimate, and I wish there were more ways to say
‘I love you’ that could represent the evolution of my love.” (Gross right? But also
awesome). Love is not a fixed state, it is a spectrum, but that doesn’t mean the
beginning bit is any less valid.I’ve meandered a bit (a lot) off topic
here, so let me try to rein it in and answer your question. As you’ve pointed out,
women are not particularly vocal about their feelings early on (although I don’t
think men are either), and it’s because they don’t want to put themselves out
there too early and risk “scaring off” a man. Which is completely silly
really, because if you tell someone you love him or her and it scares them off, you did
yourself a favor and saved yourself a lot of trouble. So if you love a woman, and sense
that she loves you, tell her. Make her feel comfortable. It doesn’t always take
months or years to know you love someone; sometimes it takes days, or even hours. And
that’s OK. But if you do still feel too uncomfortable addressing early
love with your lady, you can try what my pal Mish did when she and her boyfriend said
“I love you” too fast: they swapped in the phrase “Happy Birthday”
instead, and to this day they still say it to each other. So even if you say “I
heart you” or “pickle juice” or “fuck off” in its place,
know that it’s still there, and instead of worrying about its early arrival,
remember how lucky you are that it ever arrived at all.