With the exception of Isla, the advise you are getting is as lame as you describe the girl to be. Do not listen to people who advise you to try to be emotionally distant, unattached and so on. Such people fear being hurt by love and can therefore never love. Anybody who tries to manipulate other people by coolness and detachment is nothing but a con artist, not a lover.
The only way to understand other people is to understand yourself. Similarly the only way to love others is to love yourself. We are all the same. You can't just figure out how nuts the other person is, you have to see that you are nuts too in your own way. All you can change in a relationship is yourself. Only by being solid within yourself can you make judgments about whether your relationship is worth something or not. Are you going to bring anger into it because you have neurotic needs you feel are not being met, are you being used to fill neurotic needs, do you care, do you want to get, do you want to give, all these questions are questions we have to think about and grow with in a relationship. You have to find out these things by living, by interacting, by exposing yourself to life. You have to be your own judge. Nobody can give you a prescription. The love we are looking for is the love we long to give. Find a way to give.
Now as a side note, one thing I notice about people is the problem of inhibition. Sometimes it happens that as one grows up, and usually before hardening or fossilizing into some rigid personality structure, people oscillate between extremes of behavior. A person from a repressive environment gets a bit of freedom and goes wild. WEEEEEEEE life's a ball, but the internalized censor, the committee of screaming voices we carry on our shoulder that follows us everywhere and unmercifully judges everything we do comes back to haunt us. We see this in often in the drunk. Wild when drunk but otherwise viciously controlled. Your friend reminds me of this with the dancing. I can't dance and bingo, a gogo girl pops up.
Good luck, don't become cunning. Be open and alive. Nobody hurts as much as those who fear pain. Their fear is nothing but pain.