Dating etiquette?
Communicate, communicate, communicate. That’s my only real advice, longer answer follows I like jessamyn’s answer but I am coming from across a cultural gap — she says “I still don’t date,” but then outlines an excellent process for getting to know someone you met doing things you like. By the time you’re in a situation where you’re getting to know someone one-on-one, that’s called a date where I come from, whether you’re taking a girl out to dinner or playing scrabble at home. It doesn’t matter whether you find meeting girls online easier or if you want to get to know an acquaintance better, it’s still called a date around here. So, knowing that I have that bias in mind, here goes… First impressions vs getting to know them: It’s true that “you never get a second chance to make a first impression,” but then again, you get a billion chances to get to know someone better. So technically, though you may want a perfect first impression, it only needs to be good enough that she doesn’t d
I’m 26, and have been doing the internet dating thing for about 3 years. A year and a half of that was interrupted by a girlfriend, which I managed to snag from one of my internet dates. She dumped me a few weeks ago (she’s battling depression and found she didn’t love me anymore), so I’m back in the game, and just had a date from the internet last night. I’ve found that, for me, there’s no firm answer, but there are some rules to which I’ll adhere. I try to keep email contact going for 4-5 emails. I found, early on, that if I went on a date with a girl with whom I hadn’t had that level of contact, I wouldn’t have any good questions to ask her, and I’d have to resort to the typical small-talk questions that don’t present me as thoughtful and don’t allow her to be attractive. After a while, I’ll either ask for or she’ll offer her phone number, and I’ll plan something close to her area and take her out. I pay. It’s not a tremendously successful endeavour. Here in Los Angeles, the women o
I’ve almost never dated per se, which sounds like it may be similar to your experience. My basic feeling, though I’m shacked up for now, is that I still don’t date and probably wouldn’t if I found myself to be single again. What I mean by that is, I meet people often by going out and doing things that I like to do. If I meet people I seem to click with, I’ll often invite them out to do something with just me [this is similar when meeting people online, early meetups with lots of people, further meetups more one-on-one] and if that seems to be working out and I get similar signals from them, I’d move towards getting to know them more intimately. All of this could take place over an afternoon, or it could take place over weeks. In my experience if I’ve been steadily interacting with someone for more than a month and no moves have been made [by me or by him] I usually assume the chemistry just isn’t there and sort of mentally move on in terms of looking for longer term relationships. I ha
I haven’t dated in about 20 years, so this may not be all that helpful, but from talking with a friend of mine who’s still dating, and watching her interaction with a guy my wife was trying to set her up with, it’s my sense that first impressions are excruciatingly important. That first impression gets formed in about 10 seconds, unfortunately, and constitutes the starting point, from which the rest of the date occurs. I think this may be why the whole speed dating movement has met with so much acceptance, because it allows people to just form a first impression. I think this is pretty unfortunate, by the way, as first impressions seem to be pretty much on the order of hotornot ratings. I haven’t read Blink, but I was wondering if this is part of the system Gladwell is talking about. My other observation is that the fantasy of a soulmate, the one right person for each of us, is a totally destructive force on dating, because people wih this fantasy are rating the real person that they a
