Jennifer Sans/Contributing Writer
As you’re walking to class, carrying all your books, worrying about tests and grades, you look up and you are caught in an elongated awkward glance with a cute stranger.
The next day, you’re walking to the cafeteria to go grab lunch. You look up, and again, your eyes are locked with this same stranger’s.
Do you make a move? Or do your eyes find this stranger’s eyes semester after semester and neither party makes a move?
Why are people so extremely intimidated to approach whomever they’re interested in? I’m terrified and I’ve never even tried it, but how do I know it’s so awful? It’s like there’s this stigma that if I do approach the guy, I’ll get rejected. My whole body will just cave in on itself. I’ll get a nosebleed, and I’ll throw up, all simultaneously, you know, common phobias.
Yes, there are the days I fear my future is the life of a lonely spinster, but it will be the modern day spinster. The spinster that owns a company, looks like Tina Fey, enjoys night cheese, and has 15 cats, by choice.
Some of us are extremely shy. And to the guy I keep making eye contact with, you’re beautiful, but this staring “thing” has been going on way too long. I’m debating approaching you, but again, the common phobias come up. Please refer to the list of common phobias.
Every worst-case scenario comes to mind when I think about approaching a cute stranger. I don’t just think of one scenario happening at one time, I think of every single horrible thing that ever happened in history repeating itself in that one moment as soon as I approach him; Pearl Harbor, genocide, gulags, World War II!
Some people are just gifted aren’t they? They approach someone with ease and all of a sudden Barry White comes out of the woodwork singing “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” and birds suddenly appear, indoors.
Then you try to approach someone and you all of a sudden develop this combination of a lisp and a stutter that you didn’t previously have.
How does a person prepare himself or herself to approach a cute guy or girl? What do they say?
Well, after talking to students in the Wolfe University Center at Biscayne Bay Campus and making them feel extremely uncomfortable with my personal questions, it seems everyone has a different approach, or no approach whatsoever.
“I approached my current boyfriend when I met him. I thought he was beautiful!” said Gianni Barcos, freshman art major. “I was a friend of his sister and I would just insert myself in his conversations. He told his sister he thought I was annoying, so I thought I had come on too strong, but eventually, he was mine.”
Other students encounter strange eye contact.
“I would see him everywhere, even see him at the south campus,” said freshman biomedical engineer Celine Wassaf. “But I just didn’t have the courage to go up to him. I could tell how nervous he was around me too and I didn’t want to deal with an awkward situation.”
The best recommendation I have is to just do it. If you’re interested in someone, just go up to him or her like you own FIU and say “Hey.” Chances are you won’t simultaneously get a nosebleed and throw up.
You’ll live through it.
