Dear Michelle, I could really use your advice. I like this girl I work with and she texts me often. I had asked her to do something outside of work and she said okay but then the next day I noticed that she changed her status on Facebook to say “in a relationship.” So I said to her, “Wait, you’re in a relationship?” after I had seen the new status.
She said that she was as of that day and so now I’m unsure if I should still keep my request open about getting together outside of work. She texts me all the time and she seems to be into me but now she’s saying she’s in a relationship, so I’m could use some help as to which way to go. – Should I stay or show I go? Signed, Conflicted in FLorida
Dear Conflicted,
Timing can be everything when it comes to dating. Sometimes if you snooze you lose, and then others if you wait for the right time to ask the right question, it can make all the difference in the world. What seems interesting and perhaps coincidental, but perhaps not, is that her relationship status changed right after you asked her to go out.
Maybe she told someone she liked that she was asked out by someone else and thus prompted that person to make a move and ask her for a commitment. Sadly, very often people are used as pawns but very often it’s not conscious. For example, maybe she flirted with you to make someone else jealous and that someone else now realized he did not want to lose her so he made sure that he made things official.
As far as you wanting to know if you should still see her if she is in a committed relationship, I would suggest you ask yourself if you would have asked her out in the first place, had you have thought she was in a relationship. If you are being honest with yourself and you believe that you would like to have more than just a platonic friendship, I would stay clear of seeing her outside of work, or on any ‘one on one’ basis because it could be that you are asking for emotional torture.
It’s probably best to respect that she has made it clear that she’s in a committed relationship and then acknowledge that you had romantic interests in her but that you will not be able to act on them [at least at this time] because she’s involved with someone.
It could be that she might have been flirting with you to either get someone else to notice her or maybe she just liked you but someone else beat you to asking her out. Since she changed her status to ‘in a relationship’ on Facebook, it might be that she’d previously been seeing this other person, and your asking her out was the catalyst to cause the other guy to make things officially sealed.