This is as much as a PSA as it is me reflecting on my mistakes.

The back story: I move to a new state in 2020 to start my first job. I knew nobody there, didn’t have a car there and the state borders closed as soon as I arrived meaning there was no way I could visit back home or have friends come to visit me. All the friends I met while there are work related and not the type you’d want to hang out with outside of work hours. I was also living by myself so, as you’d expect, one gets lonely very quick. I had done photography as a side job years ago, photographing models who were looking to build their portfolio. So with the aim of meeting new people outside of work, I thought I’d reach out to models in the new city I moved to, show them my portfolio, and see if they were interested in collaborating. It was a small city so there weren’t many models to reach out to. After contacting a dozen or so models I found on Instagram, nobody replied. Just as I’m about to give up, my phone buzzes and I see a reply from one of the girls I contacted. Turned out wasn’t a ‘model’ per se, but just someone who had dabbled in a photoshoot or 2. From the start, she was very talkative and wanted to know a lot about me…this itself may have been the first hint as models aren’t talkative at all prior to a shoot with a photographer they haven’t met before. I tell her about my job, hobbies and interests and can tell she’s impressed. She’s busy with uni exams for the next month and says we can only meet after that. I couldn’t really escalate it any further at this stage so I let it go and didn’t contact her until after her exams were over – whether this was a good or bad thing is debatable, but probably doesn’t matter in the big picture given the events that eventuated after we met in person.

After a month, we finally meet for the photo-shoot. My initial impressions of her were ordinary with small talk and formalities common with all the other models I’d met, but as the shoot progressed, more and more hints begun to appear. When directing her how to stand, the moment I put my arms on her shoulder, her eyes lit up and she couldn’t conceal her smile. I’ve never had that happen with a model before, although I didn’t think much of it at the time. As we walk around the gardens we were photographing at, she keeps talking and asking all sorts of questions about me, with some that could be construed as personal in nature. “Where are you from?”, “guess where I’m from!”, “what music do you like?”, “what’s your favorite dish?”, “what area do you live in?” (FYI these questions weren’t asked out of the blue but emerged given the context of what we were talking about earlier). As the sun sets, she gets a call from her parents asking her to come back as they were waiting to pick her up. I try rush to finish up the shoot to not keep them waiting, but she’s unfazed by their nagging and tells me to keep going with the shoot (another hint that she liked us spending time together perhaps?). At the end of the shoot, she tries to take a selfie with me but I scold her for it and yank her hand away, as I’m not a person who likes my photo being taken let alone plastered on social media. She’s not offended but laughs and makes a comment saying I’m like “the Banksy of Instagram”.

After I send her back the photos of her from the shoot, she loves them and tells me she’s shown them to her mum and her mum loves it too. The day after that, she sets her Facebook profile picture to one of the photos I took, tagging me in it and writing thank you with love heart emojis in the description. Hints fucking galore. But silly me just notes this down as a kind gesture and moves on.

Every day for the next three weeks we message each other about random shit - books we’re reading, movies we’re watching, banter about celebrities, linking each other articles on random topics (like sneezing), etc. One day I posted a story on IG with a photo of a burger at a well known burger joint, to which she replies “this burger joint is the bomb!”. Stupid me replies with a review of the burger I just ate, not taking the hint and asking her out to grab burgers together.

Guys… if a girl says that burger joint is good, it’s not because she’s a connoisseur of burgers. Take the fucking hint. She probably wants to go out with you.

The week after, she sends me some videos of a park she’s at during the middle of the day, saying it’s a nice park. I say “cool, I’ll have to check it out sometime” and leave it at that.

Looking back at it all, I can’t forgive myself at how naive I was. I missed opportunity after opportunity, her hints flying over my head. At the center of it all, was my crippling sense of self-doubt and lack of confidence. I was aware of this though, and made it a point to work on myself physically and mentally before asking her out. The day that I was finally ready to ask her out, you may ask? That day never came.

Months later she tells me she’s moving overseas to Spain. I tell her we should meet for one more photo-shoot before she leaves. This photo-shoot ends up being very different to our first one. She keeps talking about herself and her future plans, not asking a single question about me. The nail in the coffin is when she calls me “bro” and thus friend-zones me. At the end of the shoot, I buy her food (rookie mistake) and tell her I’m going to miss her. She just laughs it off and doesn’t reply in any way. That day was one of the saddest days of my life. It was like all your missed opportunities staring you in the face and giving you the middle finger.

I tried to forget about her after she left but this proved to be very hard. We were still on good terms at the time, and in her eyes, nothing bad had happened between us. So it wasn’t like I could block her on social media sites and forget she exists. Once in Spain, she no longer messages me like she used to. She didn’t post any of the photos I took of her in the shoot we did before she left. Yet, something inside me made me want to work harder on myself and meet her in Spain one day where I could tell her unequivocally that I loved her.

This goal was short lived, as a month later she started a podcast on Spotify about her dating adventures in Spain, talking about all the guys she’d met on Tinder. This drove me mad and I deleted her off all social media platforms. She still found a way to message me and asked me what was wrong, which is when I spilled out all my feelings for her. It was no use. She didn’t even address my feelings but lectured me on how I overreacted to her podcast by blocking her on everything and how she now thinks I’m impulsive. Ended with her wishing me the “best of luck” and not talking to me ever since. What could have been a love story between us ended up a disaster with me looking like the ultimate loser. It’s been a year since our last interaction and now (yes, only now) is it dawning on me the mistakes I made. They haunt me in my sleep, and I can’t stop thinking about them when I'm awake, even though I no longer have any feelings for her. My one and only wish is that I, or anybody else, should never make the same mistakes again.

Moral of the story: take your chances when you can guys. Take the hints. Hell, take the very first hint and do something with it. That may be your one and only chance.

Working on yourself is important, having high standards is important, but you don’t have to be the gold standard in order to ask a girl out. Having a relationship isn’t the end goal, but rather a steppingstone to becoming a better version of yourself. I just wish someone had told me this earlier. Thankfully this subreddit has provided me a wealth or knowledge and realizations that I've reflected upon thoroughly and will take with me with any future interactions I have.

Tldr; I moved to a new city in 2020, met this girl through my side job (photography), I liked her and she liked me (I think) but none of us say anything about it explicitly. She drops endless hints but I’m too stupid and naive to take them. If only I’d done something about it, my life would be very different today.