Relationship advice from yours truly

Women, I’ll be honest, you are very emotional.

Men, I’ll also be honest, where are your emotions?

Ring-by-spring is approaching.

Scenario 1: It’s a warm, partly cloudy day at the beginning of the semester and you are walking through the courtyard texting your mother explaining to her that she needs to stop posting embarrassing information on your Facebook wall and there she is, a 5’ 6” brunette with a pencil skirt and a dark blue blouse sitting at one of those uncomfortable concrete tables reading her psychology textbook. You close your phone without finishing your message and discretely stare in her direction.

Scenario 2: It’s the first day of the spring semester, and you are “make-uped,” ironed and packed for an 8:50 a.m. English class. You realize that you are half an hour early, but, like most college students, are embarrassed to admit it. You looked at the class roster over Christmas break and Facebook stalked half the class.

While doing so, you realized that the same cute blond hair, blue-eyed football player from your last English class has the same 8:50. So, you not only want to get a good seat, but you are hoping that when he walks through the door, he notices you, says hello and sits down next to you.

Obviously, I have just given you two separate scenarios and, by the end, a description of the most likely outcome will be given. However, let us talk about relationships in general.

As many of you know, nearly 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and the percentage for Christian marriages is not any better.

With sex the main focus of the media today, it is inevitable that children are going to grow up learning the wrong way to do things.

Just to give you a few statistics, according to a 2010 article written by David Evans of an Online Dating Industry Consulting and Commentary, the average man’s ideal woman is 60 pounds lighter than him and a woman will get chatted up six minutes faster if she is wearing make-up. Last year, 21 percent of dates were organized via email and five percent of relationships were ended by text.

Relationships are not the same anymore.

To prove this, we venture back to our scenarios.

Scenario 1: It’s the end of the semester now, and you’ve walked through the courtyard three days a week for 16 weeks and that same girl has sat at the same table for the entire semester. What you do not know is that last semester she noticed you, but was too shy to say anything. Also, you do not realize she is a senior graduating in May.

However, you wasted hours looking at her from a distance when you could have been staring at her from across the table in Panera. You lost your chance to step up because you never opened your mouth.

Scenario 2: He said hello, and, to your surprise, he sat down next to you and asked about your summer. Throughout the semester you became good friends, and one day he asked if you wanted to take it a step further. You went out on a few dates, played mini-golf and talked for hours over the next few weeks. But one day he said the words no girl ever wants to hear, “can we talk.” Your heart dropped, and you knew what was coming. He told you he was too busy with football and school, and he thought it would be unfair to you if he kept going on with the relationship.

You respected him for his honesty, but you were crushed. For the next three weeks you were out of it, your grades slipped, but what you didn’t realize was that the attractive, kind and funny guy sitting behind you in class wanted to ask you out. However, because of your reaction to the break-up, he did not think he could ever match up to the football player.

My goal here is not to scare people away from dating or to shun others for decisions they may have made. I just want women to understand that that one guy you dated for three weeks isn’t worth hours of crying. And men, chivalry is not dead, so dive into your curiosity and ask that girl out, and if she says no, pat yourself on the back for taking a risk.

Do not worry about where the next person is going to come from or you will turn into another statistic.