Your first girlfriend

While at the library, I came across a book titled Your First Girlfriend by Bridget Heos which is a juvenile nonfiction written for guys in their middle school years featuring relationship advice for their first girlfriend. I am way past middle school years, but I haven’t had a girlfriend before, so I figured that it might perhaps provide a helpful tip or two.

It does seem to provide some interesting advice. One advice caution a guy to not be too enthusiastic in the way he approaches girl he likes and thereby give himself away. The book says something about not to comment on the girl’s facebook post too often and thereby make it seem that you like her. Another interesting comment from the book was regarding the popular boy-girl relationship question – “Why do girls like jerks?” According to the book, girls like those guys for their confidence, and not so much for their bad behavior, but that after a while, these bad behavior becomes uncool, and girls gradually fall out with these guys. So it’s advice is to be a good guy, but to be confident as well, and that after a while, the girl will see that you are kind, considerate, and caring, and come to like you after all.

Seem like sound relationship advice to me. I am always interested to know about female perspectives when it comes to a relationship, but I don’t really have any female friends in real life who I think I can talk about such issues openly. But I figure that there are probably a lot of information out there in the internet, and all I need to do is to go out there and look for it in order to know. And there are also such things as online dating sites where it might be a more comfortable setting to ask girls about such things.

So indeed, I have many questions about relationships that I don’t know where to start. We can start with the basic questions such as “What makes a girl like a guy? How should a guy approach a girl that he likes? How can a guy tell whether a girl likes him? Etc” From my understanding, girls do not like to be approached too directly regarding such issues. They would be taken aback if a guy were to confess to them straight in the face that he likes her. There are more gradual way of doing things, such as finding out whether the girl likes you first, or hinting that you have interest in the girl and observing whether she reciprocates. Is it a wild goose-chase to go after a girl who expresses no interest for you? I am kind of in a dilemma regarding this question. For one, I think that it can seem like a little too headstrong approach to take if one is too persistent, and it might be the case that a girl may not like a guy for whatever reason, and he will just be futile in his efforts. However, I have heard a female law professor commenting how she fell in love with the guy who became her husband after he pursued her, and according to her, people find themselves liking the person who like them first. I guess that with any other thing, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

I am not sure about guys in general, but I have read a guy’s response on his approach to finding the right girl for himself. ‘It’s easy’, he says, ‘she just needs to be 1)someone he finds attractive, 2) can hold a decent conversation with, and 3) share about the same religious values and practices as him, and then he would be willing to pledge his entire loyalty to that girl for his lifetime. A guy probably simplifies things more easily than a girl I think.