Dear Luv Doc,
Since coming back to the office, our department is officing with several departments we used to only see rarely in meetings. During breaks I’ve been talking a lot with a girl I always thought was attractive, but whom I didn’t see all that much before COVID. I was also dating someone at the time, but now I am single. On Monday I finally got up the nerve to ask her if she wanted to go to a nearby brewery with me after work Friday. She said yes, but the next day she texted me and said she invited two of our other office mates along as well. When I didn’t text her back she grabbed me in the break room at lunch and asked me if it was OK to invite her friends. I said it was fine, but that I was looking at it more as a date. She said she didn’t understand that, and that she never dates co-workers. She asked if I think we can still be friends, and I said yes, but I’m also kind of pissed because I feel like she’s been leading me on. I feel like I should tell her I don’t want to go if it’s not going to be a date, otherwise I’ll end up in the friend zone with her forever. What should I do? Trust my instincts or go have beers and try to “just be friends”?
– No Longer Dating
Like many frustrated artistic types, I am by nature an optimist. I like to see the underdog pull out a win every once in a while. For instance, though I have only stepped foot in the state of Michigan once, I am a Detroit Lions fan simply because they haven’t won a playoff game since Barry Sanders carried the entire team on his massive thighs for 10 seasons – until he searched his heart and found that he no longer had the desire to lose on a weekly basis. There are still to this day Michiganders who curse Sanders’ name because he put the brakes on a historic career out of a galling sense of pragmatism. Talk about unsportsmanlike conduct. Even still, I can’t help but wonder if Sanders lies awake at night wondering about the Super Bowl MVP he might have been. That’s just something I feel in my gut. It isn’t based on any observable evidence. Like I said, I am an optimist … and the Lions went 3-13-1 last season.
So, while I am an optimist, I definitely don’t think you should trust your instincts – especially with such fresh and definitive evidence that your instincts were wrong. I mean, there could be a minuscule chance … perhaps some remote mathematical probability that your co-worker is somehow testing your will and perseverance as a potential suitor … a probability likely preceded by a humbling amount of zeros were you to look at it on a calculator, but a probability nonetheless. I am an optimist, but I am going to recommend you abandon that minuscule, mathematical sliver of hope and wrap yourself in the healthy, comforting embrace of pragmatism.
Instead of imagining the possibility that your co-worker was lying to you, instead, embrace the overwhelming probability that she was telling you the truth, no matter how unacceptable that may seem. Just take her for her word. You know, just like you would expect her to take you for yours. Don’t be that Detroit Lions fan who spends 24 years incredulous that someone wouldn’t behave exactly as they would in the same situation. Besides, most people will never know what it’s like to have 31-inch thighs – especially not if they’re 5 feet, 8 inches tall.
This article appears in July 15 • 2022.
