naomi, 14, from california, asks:

I met this guy at a dance at another school that I went to a couple months ago, and he seemed really sweet, and he asked me to dance and everything, but my best female friend hates him for some reason. Then he got my aim screen name a few weeks later and seemed sorta like a jerk. Then, about a month before we're gonna go to school together, he sweet talks me again and asks if he asked me out, would I say yes, and I said yes! Now he's being really nice and I'm getting to know him better, but he's gone out with 16 girls in one school year last year! What do I do?!

VictorM's advice:

What else is there to do but be number 17? Come on, what's a boy suppose to do? Sit at home and wait for miss perfect to show up out of nowhere or does he go out and keep dating girls till he finds her? I say he's doing the right thing.

Maybe you're his miss perfect, maybe you're not, but there's only one way to find out. You may discover that he's not all that, so what will you do? You'll move on to the next guy, that's what. There's no shame in that. But for now, you like him (or you wouldn't have said yes to dating him), so go out with the boy, see where it leads.

This is what boys and girls should be doing -- experiencing the dating scene and trying each other out for size. As long as you don't do with him anything that you don't want to do, it's all fine. Just remember that the surest way to make him move on to number 18 is by being too "easy". Make him work for your attention and you improve your odds of keeping his.