Voting Question: A Christmas date and complications. Advice?

30/12/11

Since I’m asking this at three in the morning I’m not really expecting too many answers before the date tomorrow, but I thought I’d give it a try, regardless.

Alright, so here’s the set-up: I have a date with a girl I’ve known for some time now; close to a year, I suppose. We’re not particularly close, but we’ve gone out casually occasionally and have had a few college classes together, so we’re friends in the sense that we’ve spent enough time together to be perfectly comfortable with each other in a platonic atmosphere.

It’s fun to make her laugh and I enjoy watching her smile, and she’s intelligent enough to be both engaging and provocatively intimidating. However, it wasn’t my immediate reaction to expect a romantic relationship with her, and I haven’t deeply contemplated the possibility for a while. She’s certainly attractive enough to provoke the idea, and contrary to how I thought, several people have suggested that she may feel more strongly. This was during a time when I was still in a relationship however, and I didn’t give myself the luxury of fantasizing about women while I was invested in someone else. There just always seemed to be something restraining me from asking her out.

Perhaps one of my main concerns is that she’s an international student. I love that she comes from a foreign country and her unique perspective on things can be enlightening, but I always thought that I didn’t want to become emotionally invested in someone who was inevitably going to move away. Regardless of the fact that she’s likely going to move back to her home country eventually, we attend a community college, and her last quarter at the school was this past fall. With her intelligence, trilingual skills, and flat-out staggering GPA, she could transfer to any university in the country. There’s a college nearby that she was looking into, but sooner or later she would have to move on with her life.

Her international status was actually the catalyst for our date in the first place. With one of the most crestfallen looks I’ve ever seen on her face, she told me how her host family would be traveling during the holidays, leaving her alone during Christmas. It just didn’t really sit right with me, so I decided that I would give her a Christmas that she could enjoy. Which is why I’m taking her out tomorrow.

So, with the background explained, I’m writing this because I’m not entirely sure where I want the date to go emotionally or how I should behave. A date is, naturally, something that implies romantic intentions. I think she may assume that this is the case, and I’m not entirely sure if she’s wrong for doing so. However, the holiday makes it easy to pass this off as an outing for friendly companionship, so it doesn’t have to complicate our relationship if I decide not to. I realize it may seem arrogant of me to assume that she has feelings towards me, but at this point I think her position has been made fairly clear.

Which places me at a very critical point. I could acknowledge our meeting as an actual date, cave to potentially suppressed romantic intentions and behave like a gentleman courting a woman, nudging our relationship to a more intimate understanding, possibly initiating a series of events for eventual heartbreak. Or, I could keep it as a friendly holiday outing, giving her a great Christmas day while still acting like a (less flirtatious) gentleman, and allowing the romantic tension to settle on a bittersweet, unrequited note.

This also determines whether I give her flowers and a teddy bear for Christmas or a particularly chubby, dancing Santa-bot. (Okay, not really.)

I’m not sure what I’m asking for here, but any advice or input at all would be appreciated. Actually, I’d be happy if you just read everything. In any case, even if you only read this last sentence, I hope you all have an amazing, warm, and merry Christmas.

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