Host: What should I do on my first meeting?
Gloria MacDonald: So let’s say you’ve emailed someone through online dating or you’ve been introduced to someone through friends. You’ve been set up for a blind date through friends or you’ve been introduced to someone through a dating service and you are about to meet that person for the very first time, maybe a blind date. What do you do?
Well, a clue for you men. Women really love it if you take the initiative to make the phone call to set up the date. And I highly recommend that you talk to somebody on the phone to set up the meeting. I don’t recommend you do it through email. You know it just warms it up a little bit, so you at least hear a voice on the phone before you meet that person. It’s just a little bit helpful before that first meeting to have some more personal contact than just email.
So guys, take the initiative to phone the woman and get together for something casual. Do drinks or coffee; do not do a full sit down dinner at a formal restaurant. It just—if it’s awkward for any reason then you’re really stock in and you can be stock in that restaurant for an hour and a half to two hours. So I highly recommend you take as much pressure off the situation as possible. If you’re going to meet for coffee, meet at a nice place. Don’t meet at the cheap donut place. Meet at a Starbucks or some very nice coffee place or meet for drinks somewhere and if you’re meeting for drinks, maybe after work. The beauty of that is, if the conversation is really flowing and you’re really enjoying one another, you can go from drinks onto dinner.
One of the things I recommend is if you’re meeting for drinks, very often, nice hotels will have a very nice lounge or bar and it’s a public place, it’s not a pub. It’s a little more upscale. And again, it depends upon your age range, if you’re in your 20’ and you want to go pub, that’s great. If you’re in your 40s, in your 50s, you probably want to do something a little more upscale, so maybe a lounge or the bar in a nice hotel.
So do something casual. Take as much pressure off the situation as possible. Don’t commit yourself to an hour and a half or two hour dinner. And by all means, men phone the women and one of the things that you should do is have a couple of suggestions for places where you might be able meet.
So suggest to her a couple of times and places. Women also love it if you have ideas already and you can suggest something but you also want to leave it open to the woman. You want to be very cautious that in a blind dating situation, the woman might be a little bit more concern about her personal safety. So offer to do something in her neighborhood of the city. Somewhere that she’s been to somewhere that she would be comfortable; just be aware of that and offer somewhere that might be a little more convenient for her than it might be for you.
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