Most women’s publications are like those friends who tell you what you want to hear. You’re so much prettier. It was totally his fault. She’s just jealous. Sometimes you go to that friend, because you don’t want to change your actions or hear the truth — you just want to be coddled. You want to be blissfully unaware of your shortcomings, because frankly, that’s what feels best. It’s normal.
TSM strives to be that other friend. The one who tells you the truth. You won’t always like what you hear — in fact, sometimes you’ll hate it. No one likes being told that he stopped texting you because he doesn’t fucking like you — or worse, because you drove him away. But sometimes that’s the case. And sometimes you need to know that so you don’t send psychotic texts in the future.
Like these! The following series of texts was dubbed the “perfect” response to “mixed signals” by Cosmopolitan after a guy asked a girl in the office out for a smoothie on their lunch break (which honestly sounds like a perfectly clear signal to me).
Jesus Christ. So much wrong with this opening text. Like literally nothing about it is right. First and foremost, he was not misleading. At all. Girls do this shit all the time. You can’t make assumptions about how a guy feels based on how you want him to feel. It needs to be based on his actions. Thankfully, in this girl’s case, he was nice about it, though stern in laying out exactly how obvious it was that he was looking for a work buddy, and left it at a good place to end things where it didn’t need to be awkward for anyone. But things didn’t end.
First. Ouch. The long dot dot dot. That’s how you know you’re being insane. When a dude hits you with a dot dot dot. But second of all, why so passive aggressive and salty with a guy who let you down gently? Women are always saying we want clarity, then we lose our minds when we get it. Don’t make this guy the bad guy. He didn’t send mixed signals. You just weren’t able to read what was in front of you. This was where she SURELY bows out, right? Wrong.
Homegirl, take that sunglasses emoji, and delete it from your phone, because that emoji is cool and you have 0.0 chill. You can not blame someone else for your feelings, and hold him responsible for protecting them. He’s not at fault for being friendly to you because you liked him. In fact, that doesn’t even make sense. It’s insane. But what’s more insane is that you then go on to say that you KNEW he didn’t like you. Then what, pray tell, was the point of this conversation?! Everyone knows you don’t ever ask a guy “what this is” unless you are 99% sure that the answer is exactly what you want to hear.
Also, please let me know how this budding “friendship” with him goes now that you’ve laid the crazy on him. And for the love of God, tell me that was the “epic response,” and that this painful interaction doesn’t keep going after a triple text to a virtual stranger. Of course it keeps going. With yet another triple text.
LADIES. DO. NOT. DO. THIS.
First of all, we’ll ignore the fact that you just said that if a guy won’t be your boyfriend, he’s not worth your time or energy as a human. This is the female equivalent of a guy telling a girl he only wants her for sex and she’s useless if she’s not providing it to him. But whatever.
What we all need to realize, though? The guy on the receiving end of that “epic” text message does not care. He does not give a single shit about whether or not you “know what you want in life.” Magazines and movies make you think this is a really cool, empowered thing to say and that everyone will be really impressed with you, but in reality, you just look like a psychopath when you offer up way too much of an explanation for something he didn’t ask.
If after you kindly and repeatedly told a guy that you weren’t interested in him romantically continued to send you long messages about how terrible you were for sending “mixed signals” you didn’t send, you’d block his number in a hot minute, but not before sending the screenshots out to your group text and laughing about it for ages.
And as for this guy? He didn’t respond to that last text. But obviously not because anything was wrong with it — guys love when messages take up the whole screen. He was “speechless.”.
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