By Ayanam Udoma
Many
people will tell you that the key to a strong and healthy relationship
is effective communication. I believe that strong and clear
communication is crucial from the very first date.
There’s actually surprisingly little
real communication on a first date. When I say communication, I don’t
mean revealing your entire life history or rambling on and on about how
you hit the gym everyday whilst also finding time to raise your
one-legged, blue-eyed nephew that you’re teaching English to because his
single-mother died after a freak slam-dunking accident. No no, I
believe communication, at this point, should be very frank and
matter-of-fact. It should require you to be true to yourself and your
date and it starts from the moment you ask them out.
Depending on how self-assured you are,
asking someone you genuinely like out can be quite the nerve-wrecking
experience. However, in this situation, the more you ramble on and on
and beat around the bush, the worse it will be. I speak from experience.
I’ve recently started using a different
approach though. Nowadays I just tell a girl I want to date her. Simple
as that. I don’t do too much explaining or talk about how I’d understand
if she said no, I just make it clear that I’d like to ask her out on a
date due to the fact that I find her attractive. Now she can either
approve or reject my request. If she approves, well then that’s
fantastic but if she opts to reject my advances, clear communication (on
her part this time) can also make this whole experience a whole lot
less traumatic.
Legend tells of a place many men know
well. It is feared by many and haunted by the tears of lost souls who
are like brothers to scores of women. It is a sad place indeed. It is
called…the friend zone!
However, I don’t believe that the friend
zone is a place where one is sent, but rather it’s a place where one is
left. I don’t think most girls truly intend to make a man they’ve just
rejected their friend, I think they just find it easier than outright
saying “no, I don’t personally find you attractive”. I mean, let’s face
it, no great friendship started out with a guy getting rejected.
However, ladies, this is not a solution to your problem.
I know why you leave him in the “friend
zone”. It makes you come off as less of a bitch and it helps you avoid
any awkward confrontations. However, all you’re doing is prolonging the
inevitable. He will attempt to go out with you again…and again…and
again. Yes, you’ve left him in the friend zone but you’ve also left him
with a glimmer of hope and a glimmer of hope can be stretched
surprisingly far. Hope is a flexible commodity. If allowed to fester in
one’s mind, it could have him visualising the moment when you finally
realise that every other guy is a complete tool and he is the “good guy”
you’ve been looking for your whole life. If you were direct with him
and communicated your lack of attraction towards him from the get go, it
might bruise his ego in the short-term but, in the long run, it’ll be
better for both parties. If need be, explain to him that the fact that
you don’t find him attractive is merely subjective because everyone
can’t be attracted to everyone otherwise the whole world would
constantly be engaged in a mass orgy. If he’s not overly self-obsessed,
hopefully he will see that but if he is far too self-obsessed to follow
that logic well then, he’s a lost soul regardless.
Now guys, assuming that you’ve passed
this barrier with flying colours and have managed to secure a date with
the girl of your dreams, strong but effective communication is still
needed. I’ve often had this fantasy of giving a soliloquy halfway
through a first date but rather than it just being me talking, it’d be
my date as well. Okay, maybe a soliloquy isn’t the right expression to
use, it’d be more like an out-of-body experience. My date and I would
step out of the scene and explain our actual feelings on how we thought
the date was going to each other and perhaps even laugh at the sheer
amount of times we’d repeated the same anecdotes in the space of an
hour. Alas, this is merely a fantasy though. It often seems like life
can never be that simple.
A first date is a high pressure
situation and it is human nature to ramble on and on when one starts
panicking over how to make themselves seem as interesting and as viable a
procreational partner as possible. My best dates have either involved
some sort of competitive activity or something completely random like
chilling in the furniture section of a department store. My logic has
always been that if first dates tend to feel constructed or contrived,
you have to try and have them in an unpredictable environment: an
environment in which it is virtually impossible to plan out every
detail. You want a scenario where you and your date are forced to be
reactive rather than rehearsed, so that whatever you say or do that day
isn’t refined. In many ways this is easier said than done but I think
that these sorts of activities will make for better dates than say the
generic dinner and a movie.
At the end of the day, everyone has
their own style; but I feel that one of the main problems with the
male/female dynamic when it comes to dating is that often messages are
lost in translation or are made more complicated than they have to be.
Dating could be one of the simplest things in the world if only we’d
learn how to communicate properly.
Photo Credit: regalrealness.com
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