What's wrong with being desperate? Being desperate worked for me every time.
Last I checked the few people I knew that were so terrified of being seen as desperate were also on the extreme end of narcissism. Apparently they lack sense of self therefore think being cool means being one dimensional character as portraited in media. But they also simultaneously think of others as extensions of themselves therefore somehow how they feel about someone must be a dictation of how that person should feel about them as well.