How do I overcome being shy to start a relationship?

I am an intensely shy person who is smitten with anther intensely shy person. We occasionally will do things together but I simply cannot initiate the forging of a connection with this girl. What should I do? I don’t relish the prospect of giving up, so I don’t consider that an option.

Don’t give up! We went through something similar. It worked out. Eventually. Though maybe that says mixed things about our credentials for answering this question.

It’s a bit unclear what you’re looking for. Are you just hoping to spend a little more time with her, aiming to get your relationship to be emotionally closer, trying to get her in bed, or looking to start an official relationship?

Regardless, we’ve got some ideas. Of course, the most straightforward and effective thing you could do might be to just tell her how you feel. But we understand if you’re having trouble with that.

So we’d recommend you focus on tangible things you’d like to be different about your relationship. If you’d like to spend more time with her, try to spend more time with her. If you’d like to have more personal conversations with her, start more personal conversations with her. If you’d like to cuddle with her, maybe start by doing something fairly unobjectionable like giving her a hug or back massage and gauging her response.

But maybe even those things are too hard. So here are a few more specific ideas. If you want to spend more time with her, consider stopping by her room before meals to see if she wants to go with you, joining/starting a club you’re both interested in, or inviting her to do fun things, like going to the movies or a campus event, going for a walk, or baking something together.

Or if you want your relationship to get more personal, suggest games/activities that encourage people to talk about themselves, like taking the purity test together (puritytest.org). And if you need a reason to be more physically affectionate, say you’re trying to improve your massage technique and want someone to practice on. But try not to get too creepily manipulative about it all.

Having mutual friends can also be helpful. They’d give you reasons to hang out more with her and find out more about her, and they could be helpful (but also horribly annoying) if they figure out you like her.

Recommendations: A couple of general books about sex and relationships in college.

What is love?

What is love?

People experience love as a huge range of feelings. Rather than focusing on whether you love someone, you should focus on what you want from a relationship and if you and your partner can meet each others’ needs. If you feel pressure to say that you love someone but are confused about how you feel, considering explaining this or reflect on what saying it would really communicate to them. Would it, for example, represent a commitment you’re willing or unwilling to make?

Recommendations: One book about sex and relationships in college and one classic book about sex.

How do I know if someone notices me romantically?

How do I know if a certain girl notices me in a romantic sense rather than just teasing or being friendly?

Flirting is intentionally ambiguous. That is why it can be horribly aggravating, but that is also why it can work so well.

Escalating ambiguous affection leaves neither party awkwardly rejected, but gives both parties a chance to cool it off if they aren’t as interested as the other.

And eventually ambiguity can escalate into something less ambiguous. Even hugs and kisses can be played as friendship, but as neither person breaks off a hug and the kisses grow more frequent, a mutual recognition becomes more apparent.

If you can’t tell if she’s romantically interested, you could try flirting a little more obviously with her. If she doesn’t respond well, back off and try to be friends. If she flirts more, you’re probably in good shape.

But that’s all so complicatedly non-verbal. Why not just say something?

Also, there’s no one thing to point to that would prove it’s romantic, but it might give you a better idea if you ask a friend who’s around the two of you what it seems like to them.

Recommendations: Three books about sex and relationships on college campuses: one about the culture of hooking up, one general guide to sex and relationships, and one collection written by college students.

How can I make my long distance relationship work?

What are some helpful tips you can give to someone trying to make a long distance relationship work?

A lot of advice for making long distance relationships work is the same as advice for making all relationships work, but long distance relationship often exacerbate stress, making it more important to foresee and deal with problems.

First, figure out what you need and want from each other. How often do you need to be in touch? Do you need to hear their voice every day? Are you remaining monogamous? Are you going to get horribly jealous if they hang out with friends of the opposite sex? Do you feel like you need to know where they are all the time? Do you need to know everything going on in your absence?

Then, figure out what it’s possible for you to give each other. Compromise. Needing to know where someone is all the time and getting jealous if they hang out with friends of the opposite sex probably isn’t reasonable. Wanting to talk every day on the phone might be. Try to be generous with your time but considerate of theirs: remember that they need to sleep and eat, get their work done, and socialize with others.

Mutual trust is also important. It’s not healthy even when you’re together, but it’s impossible to keep perfect track of someone when you’re apart. Of course, being trustful goes along with being trustworthy. You shouldn’t do things you always shouldn’t do, like cheat or lie.

But you should also try not to give your partner any reason to worry. If you tell them you’ll call at a certain time, call them then. If who you’re hanging out with changes unexpectedly, tell them before it slips out.

Both partners should understand that things change over time. Expecting that your partner will not change at all when you are gone is unrealistic. When you’re apart, you both may make new friends, develop new habits, or speak somewhat differently.

Skype is also a wonderful thing. Skype is a voice (and video) chat program you can download for free. If you both have microphones and internet, you can call each other for free. If only one of you has Skype, you can also call land lines for rather cheap. Waiit.com is also a resource for people in long distance relationships.

Recommendations: A long distance relationship survival guide, webcams, and a general book on college relationships.

How can I keep cybersex in my long distance relationship exciting?

I’m in a long-distance relationship, and was wondering if you had any tips for keeping cybersex exciting. There are only so many ways to describe what you’re doing, and after a while it can get boring and repetitive.

If you’re only using a chat program, you should try to arrange the capabilities for voice chat and perhaps for video too (webcams have gotten incredibly cheap). Just varying between verbal and written communication could make your activities a little less repetitive, but using audio also frees up your hands.

There may be some ways to describe what you’re doing that you haven’t thought of yet, like using more visual description, trying to use the five senses, or being as vulgar as you can. If you challenge yourself to think of new things, you may surprise yourself, but it could still get old.

To keep what you’re saying to each other interesting, you could also consider telling, or daring, each other what to do. You could also describe your fantasies, read erotica aloud to one another, or synch up pornography so you can watch it together. Erotica and pornography could also give you ideas for fantasies and vocabulary to describe what you’re doing.

Sending each other photos of yourselves in various states of undress could be very exciting. Depending on your predilections, waiting for your partner to send a live progression of photos could even be fun.

Anything that makes someone enjoy masturbation more, like toys, new techniques, or the risk of being caught (though we wouldn’t recommend that), could also make your cybersex more enjoyable. There are also some toys designed for people with partners who are away, where a toy in one place is controlled over the internet by someone who is somewhere else.

Handwritten erotic letters could also be a nice way to keep in touch sexually, though they’re not an experience you’d share live. Photos sent online, of course, can be saved and savored when you’re not online together as well.

Some of these activities, however, can get you into trouble, particularly if you’re not careful. Though the chances of this happening aren’t very high, there have been a number of cases where people have become permanently registered sex offenders for having pictures on their phones of their underage partners, even when they took those photos as minors themselves. Much more commonly, people are just embarrassed by partners sharing nude photos of them with others.

To keep what you share private, you need to be able to trust your partner, but you also need to make sure no else will come across anything unintentionally. It’s better to resist sending photos to phones, which are easy to lose, and to keep the photos on your computers password protected. Chat logs can also be embarrassing, so you also should make sure they are not stored somewhere publicly accessible. There are similar concerns for anything you send by regular mail too.

Recommendations: A book of erotica you might try reading aloud, webcams, and a guide for surviving long distance relationships.

What should I do if my girlfriend tells me she is a lesbian?

What should I do if my girlfriend tells me she is a lesbian? (I’m a man.)

Occasionally there is a person who is primarily attracted to women, identifies as a lesbian, and still wants to be a in a relationship with a man. But if your girlfriend doesn’t make it clearer what’s going on, telling you she’s a lesbian probably means she’s also breaking up with you.

It’s reasonable for you to feel bad about getting broken up with and confused about how this changes your understanding of how she felt about you during your relationship, but you shouldn’t blame anyone, not her or yourself. If your girlfriend was just in a relationship with a man and now only feels attracted to women, it’s likely she’s feeling kind of confused. As her friend, you should try to be supportive.

Recommendations: A book about coming out and a book about sex in college.

Is friends with benefits a good idea?

What are you thoughts on “friends with benefits”? Good idea or not?

There is something about the phrase “friends with benefits” that just feels objectionable. Maybe it’s that a sexual relationship seems inherently different from a friendship, even if it doesn’t have emotional depth or monogamous obligation. Maybe it’s that it seems to describe not only a relationship, but an attitude—that the image of someone describing a situation as “friends with benefits” feels boastfully proud of avoiding emotional commitment.  Or maybe there’s just something about how it sounds.

But there’s nothing wrong with wanting a sexual relationship with limited commitment, as long as it’s something both people want. You should be careful though. You should make sure it’s clear what exactly your relationship is and what obligations you do have to each other, as sexual partners, but also as friends.

You should make sure you’re on the same page about how your relationship with each other affects and limits your relationships with others (like if you can have sex with someone else), what sort of things you’re expected to inform the other about (like if you had sex with someone else), and if there’s any expectation for the length of this arrangement (and if you’re supposed to give notice of it ending).

And you should make sure that that situation is what you actually want. Most of that is probably true of any relationship, but it seems particularly important to make expectations explicit in an arrangement where there’s less of a social norm to follow.

Recommendations: A book about the college culture of hooking up and a book about healthy polyamorous relationships.

How do I make it clear that I’m more interested in love than sex?

I find love far, far, far more important than sex. How can I make this clear to prospective partners without coming across as some sort of dinosaur?

Caring more about love than sex isn’t old-fashioned or bad, though not wanting to have sex could make some people less interested, since even people who want deeply emotional relationships also sometimes want sex.

But it kind of sounds like you’re not opposed to sex, just not particularly invested in it. Indifference to sex, if that is how you feel, could actually be ideal for finding a partner. It would keep your potential partners open to those who want sex and those who don’t.

Wanting a deeply emotional relationship (or whatever else you mean by love) and not wanting sex (if you don’t) are kind of things you just need to explain to someone before you start a relationship with them, either directly or indirectly. If you wait until you’ve started a relationship, you run the risk of your partner taking you less seriously or discovering that you and your partner have incompatible expectations.

You should also take your time as you start relationships. Even if you’re willing to have sex, doing it hastily isn’t going to attract the kind of partner you’re looking for. You can also build close friendship with people before you start considering them as potential romantic interests, giving you time to start building an emotional connection and to feel out compatibility in what you want from relationships.

And avoid ever setting up sex and love as a trade off (“I’d be happy to have sex with you, but I need you to really love me.”) That’s going to make it way too easy for someone to feign love for sex. Even if the two are related, discuss them separately and calculate for yourself (“I need someone who really loves me,” and later, depending on whether they do, “I’d be happy to have sex with you.”)

Recommendations: Three books about sex and relationships in college.

How can I deal with relationships when I’m feeling terrible?

I think being at college is making me more misanthropic and antisexual. How do I avoid making me and everyone around me miserable?

There’s some general advice people give to anyone who’s not feeling as good as they usually do: Sleep well. Eat well. Take breaks. Get outside. Get exercise. Get enough B vitamins. Consider getting a full spectrum lamp. Find someone to talk to.

College can be a weird, intense place, where some people just have trouble creating functional romantic and sexual relationships. It might be better to focus to building friendships while you’re in college and to save relationships for when you’re gone.

You can also think about what particular things in your life might be bothering you. If your social scene isn’t what you wish it was, you could try joining new activities and meeting some new people. If your classes are stressing you out, think about how you can plan your schedule differently for next semester.

Recommendations: A book about sex and relationships in college and something to help women stay sexually satisfied if they decide to put sexual relationships on hold (amazon sells a huge variety of other toys too).