Don't mince words. What are you REALLY asking me?

Submitted by Bradley, Age 25, Quebec

I’ve never been much of a pick-up artist; in part because the idea of one night stands has never particularly interested me, and second (which might really be the reason for that first part), because I’ve never managed to hook one up, rare though the attempts were.

That being said, I guess I’m not so great at picking up signals from girls who might actually be interested. And by signals, I mean blatant offers… Case in point:

I’m at the bar. Now, when I go to the bar, it’s to get drunk, not laid. So, I was, well, pretty damned drunk. To date, that’s my excuse.

So I’m at the bar, and I see a girl I knew vaguely from work. By “know,” I mean that I knew her name. She knew mine, and we’d exchanged the occasional hello. That’s about it.

So we get to some small-talk at the bar, and I don’t think we’d properly gotten past the “how’s it goin’?” phase of the conversation before she asks me if I need a place to stay for the night.

Now, like I said, not so much with the picking up on (blatant) signals.

So in a confident voice, I tell her, “Yes, as a matter of fact, I’m crashing on my friend’s couch.”

And that was that. She went off hunting for more apt candidates, and I took a couple of hours to figure out that I’d essentially declined a bald offer of sex…