Asking Her to Be Your Girlfriend: The Words, and the Evening to Say Them In
6 min read
Ask her in person and say it plainly, at a point in the evening when neither of you is about to leave. Something close to: "I don't want to be seeing anyone else. I'd like you to be my girlfriend." Then stop talking and let her answer.
That is the whole answer. It does not improve for being longer, and there is no cleverer version that works better than the plain one.
The hard part is everything around it. You have been seeing her for a couple of months, it seems to be going well, and you have now rehearsed one sentence in the car about four times without ever getting it out of your mouth. This piece is about the words, and about making an evening that has room for them. It assumes you have already been out together; if you have not asked her out at all yet, that is an earlier and different problem, and there is a whole piece on the first ask.
Say what you want, not what you are wondering
The usual way this goes wrong is turning it into a question about her. "What are we, then?" "Where do you think this is going?" They feel softer, and they are, but they hand her the entire job. She has to guess what you want before she can answer it.
Say your half first. Then all she has to do is answer.
Some versions that sound like a real person:
"I don't want to be seeing anyone else. I'd like it to be you and me. Is that what you want too?"
"I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks. I want us to be together properly, not just seeing how it goes. Would you be my girlfriend?"
"This has been the best part of my summer. I'd like to be able to call you my girlfriend, if you want that."
Pick the one you could actually say out loud without hearing yourself perform it. Then add one sentence saying what you mean by it, because the word covers a lot of ground and you two may not be picturing the same thing. "Not seeing anyone else" and "I'd like my friends to meet you" are different promises. Say which one you are making.
And keep it short. Every extra sentence you add is a sentence she has to wait through before she is allowed to say yes.
In person, unless in person is weeks away
Saying it face to face is not about romance. It is about her being able to hear how you say it, and you being able to hear the small pause before she answers. A message strips all of that out and leaves her reading a paragraph on her own, deciding what tone it was in.
The one exception is distance. If you will not be in the same room for three weeks, three weeks of carrying it around is worse than a phone call. Call her. Voice, not typing.
The evening has to be made. It does not turn up on its own
Owen is 31 and works at a garden centre on the edge of town. He met Farida in June at the leaving drinks of a friend who has since moved to Lisbon, and they have seen each other most weeks since. Eleven weeks. A dozen or so evenings, two of them ending in her kitchen with the radio on.
On the Tuesday he decided he would say it on the Friday. On the Friday he stood at her sink drying a pan he had already dried, trying to work out how to get from what she was saying about her new timetable to the thing he wanted to say. She teaches piano, September has filled her up again, pupils back, evenings gone. At some point she said she was shattered, and he said yes, me too, and put the pan down. Then it was midnight and he was unlocking his bike outside.
Nothing went wrong. That is the point. Nothing went wrong the Friday before either.
The first two weeks of September have a particular way of doing this to people. Everyone is back, everyone's diary refilled overnight, and the evenings you spend together are the leftover ones. An evening that was squeezed in around two tired days has no room in it for a question like yours, and you will feel that and say nothing, and then be annoyed with yourself on the way home.
So make one evening whose only real job is to be that evening. It does not have to be expensive or elaborate. It has to be arranged in advance, on a day when neither of you is wrecked, somewhere you can talk without shouting.
Which means the invitation matters more than it looks. "You free Friday?" produces another Friday. Something that arrives with a day, a plan and a couple of lines you actually wrote tells her the evening was chosen before she opened it, and she will notice that before she notices anything else. You can build that invitation on Ask4Date instead of typing it into a message thread, so what reaches her is a plan with your words on it and somewhere to answer, rather than one more line under last night's photos.
One thing not to do: do not put the big question in the invitation. Asking her to be your girlfriend through a link means she is deciding on her lunch break, alone, with a button in front of her. Invite her to the evening. Ask her at it.
If the answer is not a straight yes
This is the part most articles skip, and it is usually why you are still reading.
"I thought we already were." The best of the awkward outcomes. Laugh, say good, and say it properly anyway. Now you both know.
"Can I think about it?" or "I don't really want to put a word on it yet." Ask one question, gently: is there something that would need to be different? Listen to the answer, say that is fair, and then leave it alone for the rest of the night. Do not reopen it at one in the morning. You asked a clear question and she gets to take it seriously.
A no. Thank her for being straight with you, because being straight is harder than fudging it. Do not argue, and do not spend the walk home rewriting what you said. The sentence was fine. She just does not want the thing it was asking for.
And the uncomfortable version: "not yet" sometimes turns out to mean no with a longer run-up. You are allowed to notice that, and you are allowed to decide how long you are willing to wait. That is your call to make quietly, not something to announce.
Tonight
You already have the sentence. You have probably had it for a fortnight. What is missing is an evening with enough space in it for you to actually say the sentence out loud, and that evening will not appear by itself in the middle of September.
So pick the day, and get the invitation out before you talk yourself into next week. You can start putting it together from this page.
