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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 2700082" data-attributes="member: 259">Man, this is hard.  We've all been there.  Being sixteen is NOT a fun way to be.YOu may be in love in the way that sixteen-year-olds are in love, just not in the way that thirty-year-olds are in love.  Unfortunately, the sixteen-year-old way is a lot more painful.If she said no, she really, really meant it. The best thing you can do is to back way away from her.  Don't believe the idea that you can still be friends with her, at least not right now:  right now, being around her is going to be agony for you, and you'll try to act nonchalant, but you'll have an amazingly creepy rictus on your face instead of the friendly smile you think you have, and she'll be creeped out, and you'll be dying inside, and oh boy, but I am glad I will never be sixteen again.There's a movie out there, The Tao of Steve.  I don't think it's a very good movie, but it's got some of the most refreshingly honest advice in it for how to facilitate romance.  Briefly, it suggests the following ideas:1) Be desireless.  If you look like you're lookin for love, you aren't very attractive.  I don't know why that's true, but it's true; and when you have some girl with a huge crush on you who's nervous about it and tearing herself apart, and you're thinking, "oh, ick!" you'll understand.  If you can think to yourself, "Dude, I am SO OVER love," and really mean it, for some reason, it makes you more attractive.2) Be Excellent.  Find something you're good at, and do it.  This can be soccer ('scuse me, football), running D&D games, baking cookies, or playing guitar, it doesn't matter (okay, it does matter:  if you think teenage dungeon masters have as much romantic success as teenage guitarists, you grew up in a different town than I did).  Still, be excellent at something, and do the excellent thing.  Skill, competence, confidence:  these are all attractive.3) Be absent.  If you're not gone, how can she miss you?  Do you good thing, and then go away.  Omnipresence is one baby step from clingy, and clinginess is not attractive.Good luck, man. I'm just telling you what I wish someone had told me when I was sixteen and agonizing over Rose Reitzel-Perry, the lovely sardonic poet who sent me letters with e.e. cummings passages.DanielEdit:  Woah!  The lovely Rose Reitzel-Perry <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?ath=Rose+Reitzel-Perry" target="_blank">is a published author</a>!  How cool is that?</blockquote>

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