Agony Hound: 'My sisters bullied the beautiful woman I fancy, and say I should steer clear of her'

I'm slightly disappointed by Colleen's answer to this problem and naturally think I can do better.

Dear Coleen

I really like a new girl who’s joined the company where I work, but I don’t know how to talk to her. She’s my dream woman – tall, beautiful and clean living.

I’ve noticed she smiles at me, but I feel too shy to speak to someone as gorgeous as she is.

My sisters and their friends don’t like her at all because she reported them when they were at school together, which led to all kinds of drama.

They’d been calling her names, including making abusive and degrading remarks about her lack of personal hygiene, for example.

I remember her being very hurt at the time by what went on.

My sisters do not feel bad about it even now, and say she’s self-centred, ­egotistical and snobby, and she wouldn’t be interested in me because I’m not rich and successful enough.

I like her so much and would love to get to know her better and ask her out, but don’t want to embarrass myself or rake all this stuff up from school, as it might upset her.

I’d love your opinion.

Coleen says

Well, it sounds like your sisters and their mates deserved to be reported at school and suffer the consequences.

Look, who do you want to please, your sisters or yourself? I think they need to grow up and move on. How do you think they’d take it if you didn’t like their boyfriends or tried to interfere in their lives?

I think they were probably jealous of this girl at school, hence the mean girl hate-filled bullying. Source

The Hound says:

You are being given a choice here, but it's not the way your sisters are presenting it - as if it's a choice between the sisters you love and trust and some skank.

Actually the choice is between the past and a wonderful love, which I just know will transform your life.

I think you should trust your gut instinct that she's interested so the next problem is that you feel too shy to talk to her. I think if you look back in your life you'll be able to identify things which have contributed to that shyness, and I'll bet one of them was being tormented by your sisters as a child.

Look, nobody said solving your problems the witch way would be easy.

The problem with your sisters is that the support and help you can get from them is, shall we say, limited. So we now have the shyness and your sisters to deal with. Your sisters are perfectly capable of moving on from the relationship you've had up till now on their own, so I'm going to be bold and say that the way to deal with both is to tackle the woman.

Have you reflected that she could be thinking that you're hot and that's a pity because she's thinking she can't talk to you because of the row with your sisters? I think she would love it if you took the first step and broke the ice.

I'm a great one for having a script, so personally I would just think of the sort of things you would say to anyone else and say them to her. If you want to do it Hound style with no subtlety whatsoever, you could just say, 'I am so sorry my bitch sisters did that to you, would you like to go for dinner?' You could even say that you've been nervous to talk to her because of what happened and it's so embarrassing. Then if she says it's ok, tell her it isn't and your sisters deserved to be reported. You'll have her eating out of your hand.

Otherwise there are loads of ideas online to help with shyness, but trust me, the conflict with your sisters must be brought up to clear it out of the way.

Personally I would be even more brassy with your sisters and just tell them to butt out. Probably all the books would say to open up communication with them. I'm just plain irritated by them, frankly. You might find some assertiveness training helpful. If they try to engineer a fight or split the family refuse to fight them and keep pointing out that it's them doing this, not you.

Good luck!

Oh, and since this is a witch blog, get some new underwear, if it comes to it you'll only be taking them off but you don't want her to see those do you?