In this installment of the series, The Sneak talked to Stephanie, a model and artist from Southern California. Far from your stereotypical fake and superficial Hollywood party girl, Stephanie was impressively candid about a number of topics that really humanize the idea of meeting, connecting, and dating a woman.

And once The Sneak discovered she had a longterm love of video games and role playing, it was a match made in interview heaven.

See what Stephanie has to say about physical movements she finds attractive, her self-described “bizarre” sense of humor, and creating mini soap operas amongst friends.

Stylelife: If your friends were to choose three words to describe you what words would they choose?

Stephanie: I feel like this isn’t going to be flattering.

Stylelife: That’s alright, tell me the truth.

Stephanie: Okay, feel like they would say that I’m inconsistent, caring, and I guess weird. I’m a weirdo. I want to put anxious in there because I have a lot of anxiety, but I felt like that kind of goes with all of those.

Stylelife: What are you so anxious about?

Stephanie: Everything in my life ever. Everything in everyone’s lives ever.

Stylelife: Have you ever like seen a doctor about that?

Stephanie: I have.

Stylelife: What did they say?

Stephanie: I have post-traumatic stress disorder, I have general anxiety disorder, and I have a social anxiety disorder.

Stylelife: That must make dating tough. When was the last time you were in a relationship?

Stephanie: I don’t think I ever feel single.

Stylelife: Explain.

Stephanie: I don’t ever feel like I should or could date around randomly. I usually feel loyalty towards someone.

Stylelife: Who do you feel loyal towards right now?

Stephanie: I don’t know, myself, just not dating. My ex-boyfriend Kyle took me to get my new car and he took me to do all this stuff. Now, he’s flirting with me again. It’s a bad thing. It’s wonderful, but it’s a bad thing.

Stylelife: What do you mean? Do you want to date him again?

Stephanie: Oh, I’ve always wanted…he’s the love of my life…

Stylelife: And if he called you up and he said he wants to get back together today?

Stephanie: I would be hesitant, but I would say yes.

Stylelife: What makes you so attracted to this guy?

Stephanie: He’s extremely genuine. He’s funny. It’s hard for me to find people that understand my mess of a brain and that I can like completely. He’s been one of the only people that has ever seemed like they were on the same actual wave length as me, because he also has a messy brain.

Stylelife: When two people have messy brains and they’re together, does that sometimes become even more messy or do they somehow cancel each other out?

Stephanie: It was a wreck. It was a wreck of a time.

Stylelife: Are you closed off to meeting someone new?

Stephanie: I’m not.

Stylelife: You say that you don’t feel single and that you feel loyalty towards an ex-boyfriend. You also say that you’re not closed off to meeting someone new. How do you justify those two thoughts at once?

Stephanie: I can’t.

Stylelife: So…

Stephanie: (Laughs) I am willing to meet someone new, but I don’t think I actively seek it.

Stylelife: When somebody hits on you, how do you respond to that?

Stephanie: I mean, it depends on the person.

Stylelife: What’s the last guy that hit on you that you can remember?

Stephanie: Well I’m on OKCupid, so I get a lot of people hitting on me there.

Stylelife: What’s the most common way that a guy hits on you on that website?

Stephanie: They’ll just like say the stupidest thing like “Hey.” Why are you messaging me with hey? There are so many things you could message me with.

Stylelife: What would you love for one of them to say?

Stephanie: The people that I respond to don’t just ask me a dumb question about my profile, they say something genuinely interesting. Also, my profile on OKCupid says that I’m just looking for friends and for long distance pen pals.

Stylelife: I feel like you keep claiming that you’re open to dating and yet your actions close you off to it.

Stephanie: I am open to dating, but I think I need to know somebody first. Everyone I’ve ever dated, I’ve known before I’ve dated them. I’ve met them, I’ve talked to them, then I start dating them. It’s never been someone I’ve met randomly one night and we’re going to go out on a date and it’s this crazy experience. That’s never been me.

Stylelife: Would you like that?

Stephanie: No, probably not. I think I would feel too awkward. I did go out on a date with a girl on OKCupid and that was actually a really great time. I’ve always been bi-sexual, but I usually don’t date women.

Stylelife: What about in person? When was the last time you remember a someone hitting on you in person.

Stephanie: I was at a shoot on Sunday and I got hit on.

Stylelife: A shoot?

Stephanie: A video shoot. I was an extra in a friends film. It took a while. This guy started just chatting and then I think what he really liked is that I was playing Words With Friends and I tried to play a dirty word.

Stylelife: That caught his interest.

Stephanie: Yeah, then all the extras spent our day making up an alternate identity for this gentleman. We imagined him as a gay pornstar by the name of Nuke Asshole. By the end of it he added me on Facebook and I was like, “Cool, we can be friends.” Then, he messaged me saying “Hey, if you’re ever in Pasadena again we can get breakfast.” I probably will, but usually I go up to Pasadena to see Kyle so I don’t know how that will work out.

Stylelife: You’re either going to be really full or you’re going to be living out one of those scenes from a movie where there’s two breakfasts going on at once.

Stephanie: Going from table to table?

Stylelife: Taking on and off a hat or something as you switch back and forth.

Stephanie: I could never do that.

Stylelife: You say “I can’t eat anymore,” he says, “but you’ve barely touched your pancakes!”

Stephanie: (Laughing) “I’m sorry I’m so full already!”

Stylelife: You’re going to have to choose one of these guys to go to breakfast with next time you go to Pasadena. Who is it going to be?

Stephanie: It’s probably gonna be Kyle, but we’ll see. When Kyle flirts with me I have a hard time seeing other people, but within a couple weeks he’s gonna freak out that he flirted with me and he’s gonna back off again, because that’s what he does.

Stylelife: Why do you put yourself through this?

Stephanie: It doesn’t really bother me anymore. After he freaks out, then I can go have breakfast with the other guy.

Stylelife: Do you feel like you’re cheating this other guy out of a fair shot?

Stephanie: No, I think that it would be worse if I went into something while secretly wishing this other thing would work out.

Stylelife: What would a man have to do to sweep you off your feet and make you forget about Kyle?

Stephanie: He would be funny. He would be sympathetic. He would be courteous. He would be genuine. He wouldn’t care if we had fights, because sometimes when I’m PTSDing and having issues I get really anxious. It causes me to be aggressive. I don’t like it, but sometimes it happens, and he’d have to understand that.

He probably would just have to be my friend first. I just can’t bring myself to immediately jump into dating because there is so much that’s personal about me. It’s hard to just do that. I can’t. With all my anxiety, it’s hard for me to go out on a date when it’s known to be a date.

Stylelife: So guys should be your friend first. Have you run into situations where a guy was your friend and then he wanted to be more and you had to be say “Oh, I’m sorry were just friends.”

Stephanie: That happens a lot. I have this one guy who’s liked loved me, not loved-loved, but has liked me for years and years and years, but the thing is that he’s liked me for such a long time and he doesn’t talk to me that often. I think he likes more of an imagination of what he thinks I am then who I really am.

Stylelife: What would this guy have to do to explore something with you so you could at least find out if the connection was real?

Stephanie: Well, I talked to him recently because I feel really bad, because it seems like he is holding out hope for me and I think he should at least date some other girls. I wanted him to at least try it. I told him, “It’s not like you ever asked me out on a date” and he said, “Do you want to go out on a date?”

Stylelife: What did you say?

Stephanie: I said next time I’m back in town I would. When I first met him I actually had a huge crush on him.

Stylelife: You did?

Stephanie: Yeah, so we met my freshman year of college. He was a lacrosse player. I’d never had a crush on blond, tanned, jaw that could cut glass boy. And cheek bones! He had cheek bones that I just was crazy for and he I wanted him to be my first kiss really badly.

Stylelife: Wait, wait, wait…

Stephanie: I had not kissed anybody. At that point I had never been with anybody.

Stylelife: How old were you?

Stephanie: I was nineteen, but had never been kissed. It was our first quarter and I wanted him to like me so bad. We cuddled. It was the first time I’d ever slept in the same bed with a boy. He said he didn’t have feelings for me, but I’d asked him if he’d be my first kiss. The day before winter break and he came to give me the kiss and I chickened out I couldn’t do it and I left. I just ran away. After that I started dating my first boyfriend.

Stylelife: Did you kiss that boyfriend?

Stephanie: Yes, he was my first kiss. I kissed him on the cheek right on the corner of the mouth and then I ran all the way around the dorm apartment complex, not the room, all the way around the dorm complex. Then I locked my door and hid underneath my bed in my room and spent 45 minutes panicking over the fact that I had just kissed someone.

Stylelife: Why were you in such a panic?

Stephanie: I had never kissed anyone. I’ve got a lot of anxiety (laughs). I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think. I was, you know, out of my mind. It was our first date or a second date. He was really sweet. I dated that guy for three years. He was wonderful. Then, shortly thereafter, this other guy, the one that I wanted to be my first kiss apparently decided he had feelings for me and spent the rest of college pining for me.

Stylelife: Wow.

Stephanie: And us having this weird chemistry made a mess of my relationship.

Stylelife: Oh.

Stephanie: And then we broke up and I didn’t date that guy. Instead, I dated someone else who I fell very hard for.

Stylelife: We’ve talked a lot about your college years. What kind of guys are you dating these days?

Stephanie: The last guy that I was seeing was just…I think I dated him just because he’s such an L.A. cliche to me. He was the moody writer that drinks whiskey and smokes cigarettes. He loves Bukowski and Hemingway.

Stylelife: If you had to pick one non-physical quality above all else, what was it that you found most attractive about him?

Stephanie: He had a very tender, romantic heart. It was never directed towards me, but I loved that he loved other people so much.

Stylelife: He never gave you any of that love?

Stephanie: He did write one thing that involved me. I was as a character who asked him a question about what happened in the relationship that he loved.

Stylelife: That’s not very romantic.

Stephanie: It wasn’t a romantic thing for me, but it was a romantic thing for someone else.

Stylelife: What’s the most romantic thing that anybody ever did for you?

Stephanie: Hmm, there’s two things that I think of and they’re very different.

Stylelife: Tell me both of them.

Stephanie: I had an ex-boyfriend who packed a picnic and took me out to Malibu for Valentine’s Day. We had a day on the beach drinking wine and eating cheese in this little picnic basket and he made me a salad and I love food. That was a genuinely traditionally romantic thing. It was very sweet and I liked it a lot.

Stylelife: And the other?

Stephanie: One of my boyfriends and I would go up to San Francisco and pick berries together and that was just the most romantic thing to me. We would just spend a day picking berries in a field and I would make pies and things out of them afterwards.

Stylelife: Other than a romantic heart, what other qualities do you find attractive in someone?

Stephanie: I’m attracted to people who have intelligence and talent in things. And movement. I’m very attracted to movement.

Stylelife: What what do you mean by movement?

Stephanie: Well, if somebody has a particular way of gesturing, or the way that they move, I find that quality more attractive about them than anything else.

Stylelife: What kind of gesturing?

Stephanie: The way that somebody will talk and move their fingers in a conversation. The men that I’ve dated or the women that I’ve had a very large crushes on just seem to have a very fluent continuous way of moving their fingertips. And when they talk, they just have a specific way of gesturing. Each one of them also had a specific way of walking. The way that they move their shirt or the way that they straighten their shoulders is just so specific to them. I would recognize them in a crowd.

Those are the things that I love the most about them. The way the one of them moves on stage and dances is bazaar to me and I loved it. It was amazing. I think that might be the animator in me, just loving motions so much. Also, I think I’m attracted to awkward men.

Stylelife: Do you think that’s because you’re awkward and you like when people relate to you?

Stephanie: I think that it its okay to be awkward around people who are awkward. They get it. And I think that it’s cute. I like it when they’re being a little awkward. I think it’s really adorable.

Stylelife: That’s funny. When you ask a woman she looks for in a man, almost everyone says confidence. It’s a very typical answer. What you described is almost the opposite and you find that attractive.

Stephanie: Well, they still have a confidence in their own things, you know, but they’re willing to show their weakness. They’re willing to show the full extent of themselves which appeals to me because I usually put everything right out there. I’m very honest and very blunt and very forward. And I like that kind of thing, where they’re not afraid to show that they have emotions or that they care about things significantly or that they’re feeling awkward in a situation.

Stylelife: The other really common thing women say they look for is a good sense of humor. What does that mean to you? How do you define sense of humor when it comes to dating or flirting?

Stephanie: Somebody who can get your jokes. I think that the guys that I tend to have liked have been really good at improv. I do like legitimately funny people, people who make me laugh. If they make me laugh, I am more attracted to them. I like people who can make witty puns. I like people who make sarcastic jokes, and who don’t mind my sarcastic jokes, because I make a lot of sarcastic jokes.

The problem that I do have is, I like people who we can tease and make fun, but that gets to be a problem where eventually you care about each other enough that that starts being a bad thing and you need to back off sometimes. But, then it’s like “Oh, well you’re being too sensitive.” So those become fights. I need to find a middle ground for that, because I like making fun of people, and I like people making fun of me sometimes, but not when it actually starts damaging my self-confidence.

Stylelife: You look for a guy who knows how to tease you, but without crossing a line.

Stephanie: Well, it’s just, I’ll say when the line has been crossed. Just don’t get mad at me when that happens and don’t always hold back because it will be dependent on my mood. That’s a really female thing to say I think.

Stylelife: So someone who understands that, who gets your jokes, especially your sarcasm, and is sarcastic himself and you enjoy a good pun.

Stephanie: Yeah. And I have some pretty weird humor sometimes.

Stylelife: What’s an example of your weird humor?

Stephanie: Well, I made a short recently for Titmouse called Lime Pirates and it’s basically about pirates that are limes and they don’t want to get scurvy, so they cannibalize each other, because you don’t get scurvy when you have limes because of the Vitamin C.

Stylelife: (Laughs).

Stephanie: Um and so I thought thought it was really funny and the timings pretty good. You know, decent. It was made very quickly. That’s a weird joke.

Stylelife: Yeah.

Stephanie: That’s like a really bizarre joke.

Stylelife: That’s pretty bizarre.

Stephanie: (Laughing) I’ve kind of got a bizarrer thing going on that I find humor in.

Stylelife: You’ve got to know a lot about scurvy to get that joke.

Stephanie: Right, you do, and I kind of have a bizare knowledge base and I find weird things funny sometimes. A lot of its like dumb Internet humor, video game humor, and soap operas. I think soap operas are hilarious, but not actually watching them, but making them with my friends.

Stylelife: Making soap operas?

Stephanie: Yeah, sometimes my friends and will just type to each other in instant messages and we’ll pretend were in a soap opera (laughs). I think it’s ridiculously funny. I know it’s not to anyone else but to me it is. You type something like “Stephanie walks into the room and looks dramatically at the camera.”

Stylelife: I get it. I used to do a lot role-playing in AOL chat rooms.

Stephanie: Ah me too! Really?

Stylelife: Yeah.

Stephanie: Oh, my god I was totally an AOL role-player. Where did you role-play? Can we talk about this?

Stylelife: We can talk about whatever we want.

Stephanie: That’s funny. I role-played so much on AOL that I probably missed my childhood.

Stylelife: I can’t relate to that. I’ll always feel like it was a great piece of my childhood.

Stephanie: I loved it.

Stylelife: I have adventured in a lot of fictional worlds and I’ve fond memories of them. To me those memories are real and they’re super sweet. Did you ever play like Gemstone III?

Stephanie: YES! I totally played Gemstone III and Dragon Realms.

Stylelife: Every now and then, I feel like I smell Elanthia. There’s a certain smell that brings me to that other world.

Stephanie: Oh, that’s interesting.

Stylelife: It brings me back to this universe that I knew, through the smell. It only happens once every five or six years, but every now and then I catch a whiff and for a moment I’m transported.

Stephanie: I think I know what you’re talking about. Mine is different, but near the catacombs you could go on this little strange side circuit and there was a gambling hall that you could go into and they would have some kind of food. There was this one item, it was described as sweet and salty. Sometimes when I smell a sweet and salty food I think of that gambling hall. Ah, also grog, I’ve always wanted to try grog because of that game.

Stylelife: There’s mead right over there on that shelf.

Stephanie: Oh, my god you are an amazing person.

Stylelife: (Laughs).

Stephanie: I can’t believe this. Have you never talked about Gemstones III before to anyone?

Stylelife: I did with a guy named Keith Baker. He’s a game designer and he was doing a talk and I got to meet him and I asked him if he ever had any involvement in that stuff. It turned out that he did, but that wasn’t as exciting of a conversation as this one.

Stephanie: (Laughs) I really loved it. Those were those were my jams back then.

Stylelife: (Laughs) So gaming really turns you on? You really like gaming?

Stephanie: I do really like gaming.

Stylelife: Yeah are there any hobbies that turn you off?

Stephanie: I think that I’ve become this person that’s just really interested in experiencing things in life and I’m sure that there are some hobbies that I’m really not into. I used to hate sports, but I’ve had boyfriends who are into sports and they got me into sports. I thought that I’d hate fishing, I’ve never done it, but a part of the idea appeals to me. I don’t know what are some hobbies that people usually hate?

Stylelife: They usually don’t think hate anything. I think it’s a fun question to ask so people realize that mostly girls are open to things, especially if you’re passionate about them and if you have a good reason for loving it that’s not weird. Typically the answer is if a guy’s passionate about something, then it can be sexy.

Stephanie: Definitely. I’ve had boyfriends who love to build Gundams. I think that’s amazing fun. I’m super into that. I mean, I probably wouldn’t do that on my own anymore, but it was really fun when we were together. Ah, I use to wake up every morning to watch Pokemon with a boyfriend.

Stylelife: Yeah, I had and I had a relationship that had a lot to do with Pokemon (laughs).

Stephanie: Yeah, me too, and it was amazing.

Stylelife: I’d call her my Pikalover. She’s still my Pikalove.

Stephanie: That’s cute.

Stylelife: Is there something that you’ve always wanted a lover to do for you sexually that’s never been done to you?

Stephanie: Um no, I don’t think so, I’ve been fairly open about most everything. Most of my boyfriends have been pretty, I guess the term would be vanilla, so it’s not been a problem.

Stylelife: Do you like vanilla? I mean it doesn’t sound positive and yet you sound like you’re speaking of it in a positive way.

Stephanie: I’ve seen some guys that are kinkier I like that and I’ve seen some guys that are vanilla and I like that. I’m happy as long as somebody is very passionate with me and when they’re making love to me it’s a big deal to them. That’s what matters to me. It’s not the it’s not the stuff that we’re doing necessarily, because it all feels so great.

Stylelife: Is there anything else you want to tell us about dating, romance, or seduction?

Stephanie: I think that the biggest think is don’t date a lady unless you’re genuinely interested in her. It’s so frustrating to be a lady when a guys only into you for like having sex. I know I’m an attractive lady and that happens. Some guys don’t put any effort in. Be genuine. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and actually show a lady that you care about her.

[box type=”shadow”]If you could ask Stephanie any question, what would you it be? What do you want to know? Leave those questions in the comments field below.[/box]