Alright, the girl I've been seeing for a couple months now (the one from "The Bird and The Oak Tree" thread) earned her first strike yesterday. Unlike baseball, I have a 2-strike rule, so she's walking on thin ice right now, although if she behaves extra good for a long enough period of time, she can earn back her strike.
Here's the summary - we hung out saturday, and she slept over. Sunday morning she had to go to work by 9, so she got up early and left and I went back to sleep. No texting back and forth with her during the day.
At around 6 I go over to my friend house to hang out. At around 7 we start playing a board game, so I go put my phone in the other room. She texts me at 8:15 to see what I'm doing. I don't text her back until 9:15, when I just tell her, "playing board games over at Chris's house." Right then, my phone dies and won't turn back on - its been behaving erratically since I got it wet a few weeks ago. She texted me back right away, "Who are you playing with?" - fishing for an invite, but of course no response because my phone was dead so I never got the text. At about 9:30 when I still hadn't responded, she texts, "Alright, just don't respond..."
So, clearly not my fault that my phone died and I never got her text asking who I was playing with and fishing for an invite. I can empathize that she felt left out or ignored because I didn't respond back, even though I had just texted her 1 minute before, but there wasn't anything I could do. When I get back home at 11, I plug my phone in and send her a text telling her my phone died so I didn't get either of her texts until just then. She doesn't respond.
Monday no texting, and monday night we happen show up at the gym at the same time (we belong to the same gym, but we didn't plan on going together). She's clearly upset with me and giving me the cold shoulder, very accusatory looks and body language, avoiding talking to me. We both go about our workouts and finish up at about the same time, so we walk out together. She's still very standoffish. I tell her to come sit with me in my car for a minute, she says we should go talk at her house because its too cold and she lives very close, so we each drive over there.
Once at her house, I call her out on her bad behavior. I tell her that I don't like the way she was acting, and that I would expect better behavior from a girl I was seeing. She keeps testing me for a bit, trying to get me to shoulder some blame or admit fault in some way, but I hold strong. She even pushes hard enough to accuse me of lying about my phone dying, which I then turn around back on her and tell her that its very insulting that she thinks I would lie to her. Eventually she realizes that I'm not going to back down, so she softens way up and apologizes for everything.
Up to this point, this is all a textbook female testing, so I just handled it in the tried-and-true way of standing firm, sticking to logic, and not giving ground or admitting anything.
Of course after she apologizes, she gets all gushy and wants to cuddle up in my lap, run her hands through my hair, etc. This part is also textbook. I soften up my body language/posture a fair bit, but not completely.
At this point she starts talking to me just kinda about how her life is going, and the subtext of the conversation is essentially her trying to rationalize and make excuses for her bad behavior in order to paint it in a more favorable light. I ignore her rationalizations for the most part.
We make out and have sex. After sex she gets up pretty much immediately and puts on some clothes before laying back down again. Normally she'll just lie there naked with me for at least a few minutes until she gets up to go to the bathroom. I ask her why she was in such a rush to put on clothes just to lie back down. Doesn't seem to make much sense.
She gets all self-conscious and says, "I feel fat" in a very sheepish way, and then turns her head to look at me waiting for my response. She has actually gained a couple pounds, but she is far from being fat. She's not even curvy - I would still call her athletically slim, but her weight is about as high as it ever gets. She probably would be a little bit more attractive if she did lose about 3-4 pounds. If she lost 10, she would start getting too thin and less attractive.
This girl definitely does have her fair share of insecurities (like almost all girls), and I think her "I feel fat" statement was somewhat motivated out of that, but it was also somewhat another test thrown my way.
Recognizing the situation, I just went to my default response when I don't immediately know what to say, which is to disacknowledge and disorient - just not give her any verbal response, positive or negative, but give her some confusing body language. She's cuddling up next to me, so I just give her a very short, "hm" without turning to look at her, and then I run my hand up and down her arm sorta half-caressing her. She lays there for another couple minutes before getting up and going to the bathroom. When she gets back we talk about other things normally before going to sleep.
So, after all this, my question is - how would you have dealt with her "I feel fat" statement. I can see a number of flawed answers I could have given:
1) Go on the offense. Agree that she is fat and mock her. Could work, but if her statement was motivated mostly out of her insecurity, this will seem overly callous and mean.
2) Tell her to quit being silly and deny that she is fat in a very matter of fact way. This has the potential to be interpreted as sympish, especially if done with the wrong body language.
3) Go Zen on her and tell her she should work on accepting herself for who she is in the moment. This does leave the door open to her accusing me of agreeing that she's fat by virtue of my not denying it.
4) Don't verbally give her a response, like I did.
5) Something else?
Just to be clear, I'm not anxious or upset or angry about any of this situation, nor do I feel like I "need to know the right answer". I'm perfectly fine with how I already handled it in the moment, but its just something that I was thinking about and thought it would be fun to get some feedback. Funny answers are just as good as serious ones.
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