Director's Cut: When Dating Advice Doesn't Work... chapter 1: Spike's, Twilight Sparkle's, and Rainbow Dash's Advice.

In a comment in my "Too Many Marefriends (And wives) story, when Eric Reed clearly couldn't bring himself to look at ponies in a romantic way I said "Eric probably would look at ponies that way sooner or later", so it was time for him to form a crush on a mare.

In stories like these, when a character gets a crush and get help from friends, they give them different advice, which fails, and the one that works ends up being the "be yourself" advice. This was why Spike's advice of that came first; the conflict of this story wasn't going to be solved that way. I would say how it's going to be solved, but you know how Rarity is about spoilers, so...

Because of the length of the chapter, I heavily debated moving the Rainbow Dash part to chapter 2, but ended up keeping it like it is.

And on a different note, I'm seriously wondering if any non-AU stories used Twilight Sparkle in the way my "When Dating Advice Doesn't Work..." story is: by her both giving good romantic advice but also didn't have her do it in her usual "adorkable" fashion. And I can even see the canon Twilight helping somepony in that way, even if it's not as fun as she'll usually be in fanfic stories like this: adorkable.

Seriously, if anyone knows of any non-AU stories that use Twilight like I did in this story, let me know!