Are you navigating the UChicago dating multiverse too? Whether it’s a Sidechat success story or a slow burn disaster, Sadie wants to hear about it. Submit your campus dating stories, suggestions, or questions here.
Major props to the brave soul who raised their hand first and submitted this week’s question:
How can I actually tell if a girl likes me or if she just wants to be close friends?
Strolling through Nichols Park with my AirPods in, I hungrily pressed play on my favorite podcast: my dear friend’s biweekly, twenty-minute WhatsApp voice memo. (Today’s topic was Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.)
“Calypso’s not even a real character—she’s a decorative sounding board for his memories! It’s the perfect example of the Sexy Lamp Test™.”
Say WATT? With rib-tickling merriment, I paused to rewind.
My waggish philosopher of a friend broke it down for me: “Basically, if you take a female character and replace her with a Sexy Lamp, and the plot remains unchanged, you’ve failed.”
Step aside, Bechdel Test. I reimagined all my favorite movie scenes, cinematic streets illuminated in new shades, metropoles of legged lamps populating busy crosswalks—lampedes, if you will. I pictured the wet spaghetti of Lady and the Lamp, then Billy Crystal gazing earnestly into brass and pleats in When Harry Met Lamp.
Oftentimes, film tropes shed light (ha) on our real lives. I couldn’t help but wonder how my perception of recent encounters might change if the person across from me was suddenly a large, busty glow-temptress.
Albeit reductive, it was a brilliant exercise in perspective. The goal was not to objectify the objects of one’s attention—God forbid we turn real people into curvaceous conduits—but to pause and peer into the refracting glass of romantic projection with curious, clinical distance.
Now to address our reader’s dilemma. Let’s first establish the most obvious, if frustrating, baseline: ultimately, you will never know someone’s feelings about you unless you ask. I cannot, in good faith, vouch for any other diagnostic tool, nor can I advise squandering your emotional bandwidth by late-night rabbit-holing into your shared Snapchat history.
That said, humans are transparent and (hot take) mixed signals do not exist. If someone pays you consistent, hyper-specific attention, that’s a clear bid for deeper intimacy. The tripwire isn’t whether they like you (they clearly do). It’s figuring out what currency that intimacy is denominated in: platonic affection or hand-holding-in-the-Reg-stacks intent.
If you really want to play detective, consider your potential paramour a filament fatale, not to objectify (please do not turn a real human into your sexy Phil the Phoenix, sensual Hobbes’s Leviathan, or bonerific Hutch poke bowl), but to impose temporary distance between your rose-colored glasses (or conversely, jaundiced eye) and the interaction. Step outside yourself and look in, as if you were advising a friend. Would this sensual sconce go out of its way for midnight Insomnia Cookies with you if it didn’t, in some capacity, wish to be near you? Pay attention to the context of the proximity. Rely on your goosebumps, that visceral gut feeling. Crescat scientia; vita excolatur!
Beware, however, of solipsizing them for your own desires. Warping reality becomes dangerously easy when a crush consumes you. Mediocrity thrives on concepts of people rather than the messy human sitting across from you in Ex Lib. Ask yourself if the signs you’ve detected are not simply your own footprint. Spiraling is unfair to both your sanity and her humanity.
Moreover, consider the “failure” clause of the test. If you lampify them and realize the plot of your relationship doesn’t change, perhaps you’ve been treating them as a MacGuffin, a vanity metric rather than a full, complicated individual.
In any case, asking how someone feels about you is spooky (Happy October!). But when you open that dialogue, two things become highLIGHTed:
- If you really care about each other, your relationship will prevail. And if the honesty can’t snuff it out, the flame of your friendship will burn even brighter.
- If feelings are unrequited (via the friendzone or after a happy start and eventual extinguishing), you will survive. Time is an exceptional shock absorber. What feels big in the moment won’t necessarily shrink in size, but you’ll grow multitudes around it. The heart is a vessel that can house a considerable volume of heavy cargo.
And what a privilege emotional vulnerability is—to open yourself to the possibility of knowing another with fresh intimacy, or to experience the sweetness of desiring what you already have. After all, what is romance if not the radical perseverance of friendship? Imagine caring so deeply about someone that you’d want to bear witness to their entire life. Connectionmaxxing at its finest.
So, reader, just ask her. Unless, of course, you don’t actually want an answer, opting instead to edge yourself on the angst of uncertainty. One must imagine Sisyphus horny.
Right before migration, birds suffer a feverish, phantom restlessness that only a launch into flight can soothe. Stock-still outside the Reg, shivering from October windchill, you may feel trapped in pre-flight agony. The only remedy is action.
Stay LIT,
Torchbearer Sadie
