First dates are typically a mixture of nervous excitement and crippling anxiety, as you’re forced to spend an extended period of time with someone you don’t really know all in the hope that they’ll walk away from your evening together attracted to you and wanting to spend more time with you. It’s an odd social routine we must all undertake, and it’s one of the few times we find ourselves jealous of animals, as they get down to business with each other without so much as a text message indicating that they find each other cute.
To prepare you for every first date you’ll engage in from here on out, we at Crave Online have put together this list of good ideas and bad ideas. So without further ado, here’s our first date advice for men.
The best way to get to know someone is to ply them with a couple of drinks and have a chat across the table of a relatively secluded bar. Notice how I said bar and not pub: you’re not a character in a soap opera, so taking your date to your local likely isn’t going to lead to her returning your calls. Going to a bar that’s neither too swanky nor too cheap ensures that you’ll both feel comfortable just being yourselves, which is what makes for the best first dates.
First dates are nerve-wracking unless you’re Hitch or something, so chances are that if you take the previous slice of advice and wind up taking your date to a bar, you may drink too much to ward off an oncoming bout of anxiety and wind up turning into a globular heap of slurring nonsense before vomiting on her shoes. Make sure you keep a tab on how much alcohol you’re consuming and stay away from spirits, that way you should manage to avoid embarrassing yourself.
A lot of other sites will tell you to wait a lengthy period of time following a date before you text her back again, but that’s complete horseshit. This is the age of the internet and everyone’s got the attention span of an ADD-afflicted gnat, so waiting 4 years before you send her a text saying “That was nice, wanna do it again sometime?” doesn’t make you look like some form of unobtainable lothario, but rather the kind of dick who bases his entire sex life on the advice he’s learned from 80s romantic-comedies. If the date went well, text her the following day to let her know that you enjoyed yourself and to ask her out again.
Theaters are synonymous with first dates and this continues to bother me. If you ask her to accompany you to go and see a movie on a first date, what you’re essentially saying is “let’s go and sit in a darkened room with a hundred other people, sitting in silence while looking at a huge screen for 2 hours”. The most you’ll ever learn about her by taking her to the movies on your first date is whether or not she enjoyed that one particular movie.
Even if you’re not actively using your phone, leaving it on the table while you’re on a date suggests that you’ve got somewhere else to be, which you absolutely haven’t because you’re on a DATE. I know that it’s the year 2014 and everyone would rather express themselves via a status update than in a real conversation, and that phones provide a nice distraction from the tragedy of human existence, but for two hours of your day put that thing away and act as though you’re living in a pre-Twitter world.
You know that old-fashioned dating advice that basically reduces you and your prospective date to a series of numbers? The “go in for the first kiss on the second date, invite her in for “coffee” on the fourth date” advice? Yeah, don’t follow that. Not only does it completely undermine your respective personalities in favor of baseless probabilities, it also means that you may forgo looking out for more important signs such as body language in order to continue down this oft-trodden path. Every individual is different, so applying the same rules of thumb to every date you embark on ensures that, unless you happen to be dating a series of clones, your efforts will mostly lead to rejection.
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