Meeting His Friends: Part 2

(Last week we began this series about meeting your dude’s friends. This week, we continue it as promised. Because we love follow through]

The Awkward Guy

If He Were an Animal He’d Be A : Sun bear. Has a vacant, awkward stare, poor fingernail maintenance, adorable, loving.

The awkward guy. I’m not going to call him a ‘nerd’ because sometimes the awkward guy is a totally jacked gym rat and sometimes he’s a complete sports freak. But sometimes he is a nerd. He’s got hobbies. Mad hobbies. They keep him from familiarizing himself with the female sex. He’s probably a professional Halo 3 player, a collector of ‘miniatures,’ comic books, DVDs. He likes to gather stuff and store it in a sterilized container.

Mostly, when you’re around, he either stares at you, the floor, or occupies himself with something else. He might be really quiet, soft spoken, or maybe just a man of few words. The truth is he’s got a lot of words in there but they probably involve orcs or batting averages or obscure Rhode Island based hip-hop artists.

He’s a little nervous about a girl breaking into ‘the club,’ and he’s not sure how to handle it. He and your boyfriend are mates because they like the same stuff. Same taste in music, video games, whatever, and he wants to do that stuff a lot.

He’s the most likely guy in the circle to really want to make a good impression, and such, because most of his interests are maybe a little off center, he’s not sure what he’s supposed to talk about. He doesn’t want you to think he’s a massive nerdface.

The thing to understand about Awkward Guy is that everyone has some type of ‘off center’ interest. Chances are you like one thing that he likes. So if you want to sorta connect (lets say he’s third wheelin’ a date) try to find that. You might go from ‘the girl’ to ‘man your girlfriend loves Wu-Tang and she told me to protect my neck and it was AWESOME.’

If there’s literally nothing, outing your nerd stuff (everyone has one, Broadway musicals, literature, whatever) might be good too.

Eventually he’ll realize you aren’t there to judge him and like a sun bear, the Awkward Guy will get used to you being around. He’ll open up and you can cradle him like adorable baby in swaddling.