Complete novice

I’m not sure if my giving I’m-interested-in-you signs to Chatty Guy is going that well. I sent a global email about Secret Santa presents to a few people during the week, and he replied (the only one to do so) in a slightly cheeky way asking if I could get his gift for him. A few emails then went back and forth between us, friendly and jokey, but not really flirty.

Then the other evening I was checking a couple of messages on a social networking site and noticed that he was logged in too. I spent a while wondering whether to make some sort of contact, and finally plucked up the courage to start a chat with him. I then spent an anxious couple of minutes staring at the screen waiting for him to reply, and thinking that maybe I’d scared him off. He did reply though and we chatted for a bit. Again, nothing particularly flirty, but I guess at least I managed to initiate the chat, he didn’t ignore me and it did last for longer than one message each.

I feel like such a novice at all of this. Other women seem to be naturally able to flirt with men they like or to somehow let them know they’re interested, while I’m spending ages trying to work out what I should do and how I should act, and then attempting to put that into practice.

Should it just come naturally? Should I just know how to show a guy I’m interested? Will I get better at it with experience? Or are all those experienced flirty women actually working very hard to do and say the right things and underneath it all feeling exactly the same as me?

I’ve actually searched the internet for tips on how to show someone I like them, but there is a part of me that feels that doing things such as deliberately amending your body language because a website suggested it is a little false. Although obviously not doing such things hasn’t got me anywhere so far, so maybe I need to give it a go.

On a completely different note I had a notification from the social networking site which was amusing in a perverse kind of way. An old schoolfriend of mine, who I haven’t seen for at least 16 years, answered a question about me in a quiz.

The question was “Do you think [my full name] is still a virgin?”

Her answer was no.

If only.