Crush Conversion:
Wake Up and Smell the Hottie
continued from page one...

As a public service, the BTD will, however, offer this rough list of inappropriate times/places to "spring the news":

1) While either person is driving.
2) While either person is nauseous.
3) While either person is handling any kind of snake.
4) In either person's parent's bedroom.
5) At the vet.
6) During the season finale of the X-Files.
7) In line at H&R Block.
8) At the arraignment.

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Crush Conversion Case Study:

You offer to take your office crush to coffee, and are planning, at last, to let her know how you feel. As she's getting ready, she tells you, "Ugh. Last night I had dinner with an old friend who told me that he was in love with me. That's like the third person this month. If ONE MORE PERSON tells me that, I'm going to shoot myself. Or them."

Do not proceed with telling your crush about how you feel at this juncture. Even though you are sure that she is actually sending you a signal that she really wants you to tell her you are in love with her. If that is the signal you are getting, have your equipment checked.

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The Great Escape

Do keep one thing in mind. The Escape Factor is often relevant in choosing your time and place. Ideally, if all does NOT go as planned, it would be nice for one or both of you to be able to quickly duck out of sight. This doesn't mean shouting your feelings from the jetway as you board the plane for your stint in the Peace Corps.

But building in an excuse before you drop the love bomb may not be a bad idea. Say you're hanging out in the afternoon but you have... ahem... "dinner with friends" later. If things go well, then your "friends" will understand when you don't show up for three days. If things don't go so well, then, uh, you gotta go, bye!

Sorry, I Shouldn't Have... Wait! You What?

So you've navigated the treacherous waters of "not knowing," you've bided your time and by stealth or savvy have determined that, yes, the hots are mutual. Congratulations!

Of course, now you have a whole new set of interesting problems on your (slightly sweaty) hands. How do you redefine your friendship? How do you get to the next level, now that you both want to go there? How do you make it easy for your one-time pal to get comfy with the idea of ... gasp!... smooching?

While many rules of an early-days romance will still apply, you also have break down any friendship freakiness that threatens to undermine the new world order. For weeks or months or, possibly, years, you and your newly-love-interested have had the same patterns and rules of your pre-relationship relationship. It's time to stir things up a bit.

Change the Playing Field
If the only chance you ever had to talk to the pretty red-haired girl was dropping off Zip disks at her office, then you'll do yourself a service when you say, "Instead of coming by your office, why don't we go to the rodeo?" Or whatever. Catch a really crazy show. Take a road trip. Change the scene, and you'll find that it's easier for both of you to change the script.

Rewrite the Rules... A Little Bit
Where once it was all right to, say, throw ice from your soda down your friend's shirt, it may now be wise to rethink some of your previous behaviors. After all, you have graduated from pal-dom; you should also let your expressions of affection start to take a high road.

You have a terrific advantage in knowing something about their tastes. Say you know there's something they like; a cool band for example, or curling. Now, instead of just mentioning it, you're allowed to suddenly appear, tickets in hand. Reward your crush for crushing you back. Let it be known -- early and often -- that this is a new and better world.

Be Ready to Be Surprised
You may think that you know so much about your (former) crush that they couldn't possibly do any wrong. Wrong! It's a brave new world you're in and you may find that when your romance pushes different buttons, different personality traits pop out.

Crushes allow us to idealize other people, sometimes for months at a time. Once you've taken the relationship training-wheels off your new affair, remember that you're with a whole person, not just the groovy things they used to do to your heart from afar. Tricky, maybe, but... kinda cool, right?

If you've gotten this far, it's time for Breakup Girl to take over. And there will be a world of relationship questions to deal with as you two sink into sloth and become the envy of all your friends. But there'll always be one question you can answer with a smile: "So, how did you meet?"

"Well," you'll say, "It all started with a crush...."

Colin Lingle rolled the dice and hit the jackpot. Last BTD he wrote was all about romance languages.

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