Survey the District: How to Make Him Like You Back

dear date the district,

could you perhaps offer some advice as to how a girl goes about asking a guy out?/sparking the attention of a guy? so far the posts have mostly been about how to act when already in the middle of a hooking up relationship or about how to act when being pursued.

Unfortunately, we never post about this because there really is no trick to making a guy like you.

There’s usually an initial on ne sait quoi that makes two people want to jump each other’s bones, and if people could figure out how to force this, match.com would go out of business.

But while there’s no magic potion you can slip in his drink, there are things you can do to make yourself look more attractive to the opposite sex in general.

To start, you have to stop thinking of them as guys.

A lot of girls seem to switch personalities as soon as a guy walks into a room. They get giggly and ditzy. They go into flirting overdrive. They latch on to a guy and try so hard to engage him that it looks like they’re about to attack their potential crushes.

Strong come-ons rarely turn guys on, for reasons we’ve discussed countless times. When a girl seems like a sure thing, the guy looses the thrill of the chase. And while he might take her home that night, he’s probably not going to take her out to breakfast the next morning.

So if 90% of girls turn into man-hungry fiends when they smell male pheromones, you can distinguish yourself by not giving into the urge to go crazy when you’re talking to a guy.

What does that mean? Treat him like a girl. If you were meeting your friend’s new roommate for the first time, you wouldn’t rub her chest and say, “Ohmygod, that sweater looks so soft!”

And you wouldn’t clam up and wait for her to talk to you.

Instead, you’d probably start with something like, “Oh, what do you do?”

If the conversation turned to the subject of her favorite restaurant, you wouldn’t say, “You and I should totally go there some night. Just the two of us.” You wouldn’t get nervous and start talking too much. You wouldn’t brag about how many guys have asked you out this year. If you act the same way around a guy, you give your awesome, bubbly personality the chance to shine through.

But what if you’re already friends with the guy you like (as the reader above seems to be)?

These types of situations tend to get really sticky really quickly. When you like your guy friend, it’s easier for him to (unwittingly) hurt your feelings. Because you have feelings for him, you might subconsciously hold him to higher standards. But because he doesn’t know about your feelings, he doesn’t know to adjust his behavior. And he’ll treat you like he treats all his other friends. That might mean accidentally passing out at 10 p.m. when you two were supposed to hang out later that night.

If your girl (space) friend pulled that move, you’d probably be pissed and give her shit about it, but you’d ultimately accept her apology. But if the guy friend you like does this, you might want to send him a text along the lines of, “omg i can’t believe u blew me off i am so sick of putting up with ur shit do u care about me at all?”

If your girl (space) friend sent you a text like that, it would feel like it came out of left field. And that’s exactly how your guy friend feels too. Psychosis doesn’t look sexy on anyone, so that isn’t the way to win your friend over.

If you want to date him, your best bet is to make him realize how much he likes hanging out with you while making him question whether or not he has a chance with you. This means not dropping everything to hang out with him each time he calls. If your best girl (space) friend asked you if you wanted to come over and help clean her apartment, you’d say no. Don’t give this guy special treatment.

When you feel yourself getting mad or jealous, pretend that he’s a girl that you feel bad for, but don’t really like. You know that friend of a friend who just moved into your neighborhood, and she’s really aggressive and awkward, but you can’t blow her off completely without pissing off your friend?

Instead, you let her down really easily. When she calls for the fifth night in a row, you say, “Oh my God, I would love to come over and hang out with your cats, but I have to work late tonight. Such a bummer though!”

Do the same thing with him. When he texts the next morning to apologize for sleeping through the party he was supposed to take you to, tell him it’s no problem!!! But when he calls you that night to see if you want to come over, tell him you’d really, really love to, but you promised your goldfish that you’d hang out with her tonight.