How To Kiss, How To Talk To Your Co-Workers, And How To Internet

A good way to start an advice column is to come in guns blaring, really ready to Help People, and then to do one column and disappear for several weeks promoting a fun, cool book everyone should buy.

Just kidding! That is not a good way to do this. If I was to give myself any advice it would be: “Manage your advice column better, you goon.” So here I am, full of apologies and ready to make good on that advice. I hope the answers to these questions help you sort out a few things in your own lives, or at least make you grateful you are not currently dealing with these problems. Sometimes a little schadenfreude can really turn a Wednesday around. As always, please feel free to leave your contradictory advice or gentle agreement or related personal tales in the comments.

I consider myself a reasonably competent dater. I am capable of asking out another adult person without feeling too nervous about it, and I can handle myself during the dinner or drinks portion of a date just fine. But once things move from a public place to a home or heavily wooded bit of the park, I get devastatingly awkward. How do I transition from the talking part of a good date that’s clearly heading towards sex/kissing to the actual moment of sex/kissing without wanting to die?

Everyone I know has a different method of dealing with this confusing “when are we going to kiss, you have a nice apartment, what’s your rent like, but really are we going to kiss soon” zone. I don’t actually hate it there. I’m very much a “the more excruciatingly palpable the better” kind of girl, re: sexual anticipation. I like to notice this feeling and then really camp out there. The first night my husband and I went home together, we sat on a couch talking very closely and only lightly, occasionally touching until seven in the morning. (I do not think this was his preference, but I had a great time.) (To be fair, after seven it was VERY ON, and now we’re married so he can calm down about it.)

If you’re not into being tense and clenched and kind of on fire for several hours, do not adopt my method: talking obliviously until they decide they need to kiss you to stop it. Actually, I realized while trying to answer this question that I do not have a lot of ~sexual moves~ and decided to outsource my advice to pals who like to plan ahead. Perhaps you would prefer the more direct approach of an unnamed friend who just very pointedly asks “Are we going to kiss now” when it seems like the time is right to start kissing? A recent Horny Jail escapee suggested “pointedly staring at their mouth and then eyes and then mouth again, making non-creepy but lasting eye contact.” Another woman who has figured her shit out says she just wears very bright lipstick on the date and then at some point goes to the bathroom and POINTEDLY REMOVES IT. I mean…yes? Yes. Throw in a bit of that lingering non-creepy eye contact and I think you have yourself a make out there, no question.

Questions like these really illustrate the fallacy of advice columns: there is nothing I could say that would work for every person hoping to transition from “I had a lot of fun tonight” to becoming joint mayors of Smoochville, USA. Even the most tried-and-tested move only works on a certain kind of person on a certain kind of night.

As far as useful tips go, just trust yourself to pick up the hints that someone wants to make out, then maybe…move closer to them? People who want to kiss you will generally not recoil from this. Once you are closer to each other and both clearly feeling that stomach/groin fireball dreadlust thing, it’s up to one of you to say or do something to initiate the actual kissing and/or sex, and how that works out is totally personal and part of your own unique dynamic. In general: don’t worry about it. The biological imperative is very strong and kissing will probably happen on its own as nature continues its magical dance.

I have a job I like that I’m not crap at, and which pays a decent salary. I feel generally very lucky to have this job. My co-workers are all really nice people, they’re just…basic as hell. I don’t feel like we have anything in common, and making even minimal conversation with them feels like pulling teeth. Like, what are your interests, coworkers? What are you about, even? We have to work pretty closely together, and I am finding it a bit of a grind to work with people I can’t talk to and wouldn’t want to have a drink with after work. Also, I’m running out of excuses for not joining them at after work drinks. How do I work co-operatively with a team of pure basics?

Real question from a woman whose only co-worker at present is her cat: aren’t everyone’s work colleagues terrible mysteries? The entire premise of “team building exercises” and matching-shirt work retreats and Pyjama Fridays or whatever is that there is no way this group of people can be trusted to get to know each other on their own, they are simply too different and also probably don’t want to. I wouldn’t stress too much about not being on the same page as your co-workers, as this seems to be the normal state of things.

This question has two possible answers, and it depends on how you really feel about work: are you in it for the paycheque, and consider your work life to be very much separate from your more enriching personal life, or is this line of work something that matters to you, and that you consider an important part of Who You Are? If the former, go to after work drinks exactly once, stay until the end of happy hour, then leave. You are not your job, and nowhere in your contract does it say you have to be friends with these other people who also work in your office. During work hours, be polite and respectful and helpful, but don’t feel bad about spending lunch breaks alone or with friends who don’t work with you. If you need to make conversation during a Work Birthday Cake Meeting, bring up the latest big film or any sport. [Hot Tip for people struggling to make conversation everywhere: there’s almost always recently been A Sport.]

If your job is more than just a job, not being able to get along with your co-workers is a bit of a bigger problem. If you really want to do this job forevsies and to love it and mean it every day, you’ll probably have to find your people. (Or consider the potentially unappealing-to-you possibility that these happy basics are, in fact, your people.)

At what point do you move on from an internet outrage for your own sanity? I don’t have the emotional space for it!

No one does! Move on almost immediately. If the outrage has sparked something in you, that’s great. What is it? Identify the root of your disgust. How can you do something concrete to quiet that rage? A thing that takes time out of your day, that you can devote your whole self or at least a major part of yourself to, and that you can’t do while also sitting on the toilet. A thing that is not “call for a television show to be boycotted via Twitter.”

I am, on the whole, extremely uncomfortable with most sustained internet outrage. Past a certain point it can get very performative, a bunch of people yelling LOOK AT MY CORRECT OPINION to each other across a canyon, basking in the echo while the issue about which the opinions are held has hopped on a donkey and made for an outpost somewhere farther along…the…valley floor…and…well, the canyon metaphor is not great, but I think you get what I’m going for. Instead of saying to your friends, or even the celebrity racist you are mad at, “I’M MAD,” why not process that anger as a call to action and do something IRL to combat the forces of evil in the world? It’s not that the internet isn’t real life or that it can’t exact real change, it’s just that there are other things you can do as well, and sometimes they are less stressful than fighting with a 14 year-old bigot for hours online. I #believe in #you.

Monica Heisey is a writer and comedian from Toronto. Her first book, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better, is available in Canada and on Amazon now.