[Feeling Asea]

Warning, this 'brief' is longer than most. If you don't feel up to reading through a heck load of writing, it'd be best to leave now.

Right, so... I'm 17, English, and am attending my second year of Sixth Form. In short, there's a girl I feel quite deeply enamored with, but don't have much of an idea -outside of educated guesses- as to what to do with this 'love'.

We're both 17, as far as I know, attend the same Sixth Form, and are re-sitting our first year for differing reasons. I've known of this girl for a few years but only formally met her early July just gone. But despite knowing her for a couple of months, I hardly know anything about her. At all. In essence, we've only known each other for a few weeks, due to 6 weeks of the two month span since we met being spent both away from school and each other. So this would be the main source of the problem: our unfamiliarity with each other, and my crappy way of dealing with this.

I'm a rather introverted person and usually take several months to feel safe around another person. It's because of this reason that I heavily rely on my more outgoing friends to soak up another's attention while I slowly get used to their presence; but strangely, this isn't exactly the case with her. I've known her the least length of time out of all my friends, yet I feel very comfortable around her. Even to the point where my actions and manner of speech could act as hard evidence against me not being a socially awkward individual. But I'm in no way dependent on her for being more extroverted. I can assure you that I act the same way when around no-one but my close friends, all of which I've known for years. Sounds fine, right? Almost. Through my several years of attending mandatory education, I've never once been the one to try and make friends or make myself more familiar with another's interests or hobbies. It's usually someone else trying to be my friend or me finding this stuff out when people are talking to my friends and I just happen to be overhearing it, which, actually, is where a much smaller problem comes up. She and I only have two mutual friends, one of which I only speak to on occasion and the other she only speaks to on occasion. Thus making my most used method of info gathering completely useless. And now onto the first reason this question is being made.

How do I become good friends with her?

I understand that this is much more of a social problem than the kind of 'relationship' problem it may have first appeared to be, but I'll most likely be coming back later for help in that field too.

Anyway, my situation should be pretty clear by now, as should what I need help with. But before I leave you to give me your best advice, I thought it'd be worth to let you all know everything I know about this girl, since I have a very limited amount of knowledge on her and understanding something about a person allows for better judgement on how to go about befriending them... usually.

She's kind of crazy -or eccentric, if you will-, a little random, and is overall quite a funny person (to me, at least). I also know that she missed most of last year at school because of some physical and mental problems, which I dare not dive into this early on in a friendship. I usually see her hanging around with the one mutual friend she regularly speaks to. In fact, it's quite rare to see the two of them apart. She's also kind of touch-y feel-y with whomever she seems to be comfortable around, which would extend to just me and our friend. By touch-y feel-y, I mean light punches, grabbing and turning, hip-bumping and any other physical contact, really. I also found today that she's willing to go into my back pocket to retrieve our friend's ID card, but that might be slightly beside the point. She also said that it'd be fun if I were to get a part-time job at the cinema where she works, but I assume that's something to brush off as a friend merely wanting to hang out a little. Ah, I also forgot to mention that we share no lessons and have no simultaneous free periods, so break and lunch are the only times where we can actually talk. In addition, she usually leaves at lunch with our friend if she has free periods in the afternoon, except for once where she stayed behind during lunch with me just talking and having fun.

Anyway I've rambled on enough. Does anyone have any advice on how to establish a stronger friendship and share more information between ourselves without me making the entire thing awkward? As I said, this is a first for me and I'm extremely lacking in the social interaction section. I feel as though I should be able to do some of this on my own accord, though I fear that my lack of social interaction and feelings towards this girl are acting as a bit of a detriment to my sense of deduction and logical reasoning.

And one final note, I've never been the most successful with girls and the subtle signs given when one feels drawn to another lay outside of my psychological understanding, so I really have no idea what I'm dealing with here if there's anything extra to deal with.

[N0help4u]

Talk with her more. Make little comments here and there like 'I like the way you made me laugh', 'l like the way you had your hair the other day', etc... Ask her things like her favorite... Try asking her if you can walk her to class or eat lunch with her.

[Jiser]

You need to build up a bit of comfort with her then hang with her outside sixth form in groups then you can get her alone ;) For example parties :)

Also please try to preoccupy your time with other things to preoccupy your mind :)

Voilà!

[Feeling Asea]

Thank you both for your answers. So just to reiterate, all I need to do is spend more time with her and try to make 'small talk' with the occasional complement? There's nothing else I'm really required to do?