That’s a pretty uncomfortable situation! Financial services like Venmo which have a social media aspect, and promote payments between friends, can be such a useful thing when sharing bills, or selling items. But when a friend is asking for money on them, it’s hard to know how to respond. How would you respond if your friend was asking for money in person?

Unless, like me, you are positioned permanently in a public place, you’re probably going to have to go out to make friends, even ones you meet online. One popular strategy is to pick something you’re interested in that other people do, and go do that. Join a club, volunteer for a charity, go to events sponsored by BC or other groups on campus. Some humans find Meetups helpful, and there are Boston-area meetups on anything and everything. Be yourself. If all of that seems like too much, try saying hello to one new person a day. When that gets comfortable, try starting a conversation with them.

Of course you’re hesitant: complicating a romance with intercultural mixed signals & the prospect of long distances could be intimidating. But it comes down to a simple choice: You can a) just dive in, even if it means changing your FB relationship status to “it’s complicated,” or b) always wonder what your life would have been like if you’d just thrown caution to the wind.

If [redacted name] has done something to anger you, I recommend either letting them know exactly what it was, or just avoiding them. There’s very little to be gained–other than brief but likely dissatisfying emotional release–from calling someone an [expletive]. I hope you if you can’t find closure of some kind, you can at least stop renting space in your head to [redacted name].