Dear Hamza:

You are welcome.  “Given she ended her last email with ‘happy to discuss in person’ and we live 5 minutes away from each other, do you think I could relay that message to her in person rather than over email?“- the benefits in an email vs a meeting in-person are: (1) in email, you have all the time that you need to compose just the right message, while in-person you may get distracted, lose your focus, get emotional perhaps, resulting with not delivering the message you intended, (2) in email, she will have a record of your message, which she can re-read in the future as many times and as thoroughly as she needs to read it; during an in-person meeting, she may get distracted herself, hear her own thoughts over your words, and later, she may not have an accurate memory of all that you said.

“At least that way she gets to see me in person one last time talking to her calmly and kindly (resetting the image in her mind of me as emotionally fragile etc.)?“- you can close the email I suggested with an offer to meet her in-person for coffee or the like. You can, of course, choose to forgo the email altogether and meet her in person instead.

“I’m still not 100% the guy she likely deserves“- I’m sure that there is no guy in the whole wide world who is 100% what she deserves or what she would like.

I read your options and my advice is that you send her the email in the next day or two, right after you finish putting it together to your satisfaction.

“2. Continue to work on myself for another 1-2 months, and then let her know I’d like to meet her in person again..“- no, because you need to work on yourself without the hope and intent to impress her/ to get her to change her mind.

anita