Where I want to go on a date
By Lori Gottlieb and Kevin Bleyer Here’s a (very funny) woman’s viewpoint on what location makes for a great date. For a guy’s perspective, read Guys: How to plan that date.She says:
When choosing where to live, women want to be near a gourmet grocery store, a friendly dry cleaner, the office, the gym, and the guy who cuts our hair. But when choosing a place for the very first date, all we want is to be near our car. Our car is our getaway vehicle should disaster (or mind-numbing boredom) strike.
Let me make this easy for you guys: Women have enough to deal with before a date, like preparing for post-date disappointment and plucking our lip hairs. So we want the logistics to be easy. We don’t want to schlep across town—but nor do we want to be picked up. We’re not cleaning our apartments, lighting scented candles, and stocking drinks and crudités in the fridge for someone who hasn’t even taken us to dinner yet. Basically, we’re looking for the location equivalent of Switzerland: neutral territory. So please, pick a place where we can meet you halfway.
If you get there before us and are talking on your cell phone, don’t hold up a just-a-sec finger signal when we arrive, then keep talking for the next three solid minutes. It’s awkward—we can’t look at you, since that would invade your privacy, and we can’t whip out our own phones and start making calls, since you indicated that you’d be off in a second. What are we supposed to do with our eyes? On the other hand, try not to arrive after us. Because then we’re forced to whip out our cell phones (so we don’t look like losers sitting alone in a café, possibly about to be stood up) even if we don’t need to make a call. (Usually I just check my home messages, and let them run in a loop until the guy shows up.)
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Don’t choose a place that’s so loud we have to ask “What?” after each sentence you utter. It doesn’t make you look “popular” if you pick a place where you just happen to see 10 of your closest friends. Running into your parents doesn’t make you seem “family-oriented.” Being on a first-name basis with the hostess doesn’t impress us. Flirting with the hostess pisses us off. Giving the bartender the thumbs-up sign essentially ends the date.
Some guys add “activities” into the equation. Instead of asking for a simple meal, they’ll tack on a movie, museum, or amusement park. Save these for later dates. We don’t want to be trapped in a movie theater with an aspiring film director who spends the entire two-hour dinner bragging about his accomplishments, only to hear him whisper during the movie previews, “I could have done that so much better.” We don’t want to stare at naked female bodies at a photo exhibit before we’ve seen you naked. And despite the name, there’s nothing amusing about going to an “amusement park” and puking our guts out on the double-loop.
Other men suggest athletics—hiking, tennis, Rollerblading. I don’t know who put the “multiple location” idea in men’s heads, because there’s not a sane woman anywhere who welcomes this itinerary the first time out. It’s like packing for a trip: What are the weather conditions? What’s comfortable for the activity but also attractive for the meal afterward? Will there be showers nearby? Even worse, we never know how a guy might respond to our athletic performance. Some men may be turned off if we’re uncoordinated, others may resent us if we’re better than they are. Which is a problem, because we’ll no longer be near our cars to make a quick get-away.
Remember, there’s a purpose to a first date. We’re trying to get as much information as possible about each other in as short a period of time, in order to see if we want more information over a longer period of time. But men and women acquire this information differently. Men like to go to events so they can observe us (Did she cheer for the wrong team at the baseball game? Can she dance to alt-rock?) while women prefer sharing a meal so we can pepper our date with questions (So, when was your last relationship?). Which method is better: Passive observation or active conversation? As my friend Michael put it, “I pick a place where I think she’ll be happy. Because if I’m happy and she’s miserable, in the long-run, I’ll be miserable, too.”
Good advice. But when you ask us out, don’t reveal all the angst that went into your decision. If you’ve got weird fetishes about location, keep them to yourself. Don’t share tidbits like, “I can’t go anywhere with checkered tablecloths. It has to do with what happened at my fifth birthday party.” And please don’t give us a choice of where to go. (We don’t ask you to choose whether we should wear the cropped black trousers or a Guess halter dress.) Like a concierge in a hip hotel, casually toss the name of the restaurant off the tip of your tongue, as if there are dozens of equally perfect places you might have spontaneously suggested instead.
Because if you manage to pull this off, you might get lucky enough to pick a place for our next date, too.
Lori Gottlieb is the author of the national bestseller Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self and a regular commentator on NPR. Kevin Bleyer is a writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. From I Love You, Nice to Meet You by Lori Gottlieb and Kevin Bleyer. Copyright© 2006 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.