Group therapy in a blog.
“JDaters Anonymous Live” Yields Strange Results
It’s been a while since I posted here, I know. I’ve been running around presenting at conferences like a crazy person, or at least the type of crazy person who’s asked to speak at conferences. And a quarter of those presentations centered on our topic at hand: dating and relationships.
This past weekend, I spoke to a crowd of 200 people – most of them students in their early 20s – about the challenges of dating in the age of technology. The session was titled – somewhat obscurely – “JDaters Anonymous Live,” which led people to make their own assumptions about what the session would address. Some thought it was going to be speed dating, or me talking about my dating horror stories, or an opportunity for the participants to share their horror stories. And as a result, although I tried to keep the conversation to the topic at hand – technology, and how it complicates our communication process even as it keeps communication more frequent and varied – people just wanted to vent.
They were angry. Angry about being rejected. Angry about being deceived. Angry about not being called back, or being passed over in favor of a friend. But one of the comments made by a twentysomething male really gave me pause. He stated that he knows, definitively and always, whether it’s going to work (he meant a date) within the first five minutes of meeting someone. Shocked, I polled the room, and most of them agreed, not just about a date/potential romance, but about a potential friendship. When I suggested that perhaps it was because the people in the room were under 25, I almost had a mutiny on my hands. The room was fairly united. Five minutes. And they’d know.
Maybe I err on the side of believing that first impressions, while often fairly accurate, do also contain a margin of error – some of the people I met and instantly liked I’ve since fallen out of like with, and others, who were slow starters for one reason or another have emerged as some of my nearest and dearest. While I’m talking about friendships mostly, I find the same is true for me in dating…I think most people become more interesting as you spend time with them, and it’s not fair to judge someone from five minutes of interaction.
Here’s the part where all y’all weigh in and tell me what you think…
I find that my second impression is usually more accurate than my first, so I almost always go for a second date or meeting.
I have a friend who has a three-date rule – unless the guy is seriously dangerous, she always goes on a second or third date, and I think that sounds like a smart strategy. She’s in a relationship now, btw – it’s official on Facebook and everything.
Hay muchos temas planteados en este artÃculo.
Por un lado, parecerÃa ser que los adolescentes de 20 juzgan o “encaran” el amor y las citas de una manera diferente que los jóvenes en sus 30’s. (Cosa que no comparto)
A su vez se deberÃa definir al tema de -la tecnologÃa y comunicación- como Nexo, Causa o Resultado de ese vacÃo existente entre las personas, al momento de relacionarse.
Si es LA PRIMERA IMPRESIÓN o UNA AMISTAD, lo que se está barajando como “problema†para un fructÃfero resultado en la pareja… la respuesta es bastante evidente…
Claro está, que en un mundo donde todo entra por los ojos, para evadir una primera impresión y conocer a la persona, uno de los medios que habilitan dicho encuentro, pueden ser, justamente, los nuevos medios tecnológicos, que ahora están a nuestra disposición…
Cerrando asÃ, esta red de interrogantes que atañe (no sólo a los veinteañeros) sino a todos – asumo.
http://www.frengly.com/
First impressions have their uses, but second and third are just as useful. Looks, and impressions, can be very deceiving.
Well, it depends. When you’ve stuck it out “getting to know someone”, how many of us out there who didn’t like someone right off the bat were pleasantly surprised later, or did the person continue to be a dud? I think that will depend on the person themselves and how good of a judge of character they are at first sight versus later acquaintance.
I do tend to be of the “five minutes” school, mostly because when I dated people I wasn’t interested in to “give them a chance” I was still just as uninterested in them after having spent more time with them. If you sense that someone’s a jerk right off but become friends with them (in this case, my friend’s fiance), well, in that case I was right and he was a jerk.
But there are lots of happy, or at least stable, marriages out there in which one person, usually the woman, initially didn’t think that highly of the other.
Personally I think single 20-somethings are not in a position to make definitive statements on relationships. It would be better to survey older people.
I’d say there’s some merit in both approaches. But giving someone a bit more time and some more exposure might benefit all parties for any number of reasons. Still, it’s often possible to tell if there’s no ‘match’ possible within the first 5 min. according to reasonable criteria. (He just can’t talk well much of the time, is rude, distant, and yet fairly pompous, & smells bad to boot). So Mickey Rourke is a bit of an acquired taste and probably not your bag. You get the picture.
So I think it’s an age graded thing too, for certain. It’s one of the universal conceits of youth that ‘there’s another bus or perhaps a better prospect coming along every 10 min. or so’, so why waste your time on the otherwise ‘marginal’ prospects you might see or otherwise surmise is before you? People are more or less disposable in this scenario, and not very useful to you if they’re not serving the one function you might demand of or from them, be it romance, a job or a ‘connection’ to either.
So youth is often quite willing & able to make these ever quick ‘summary judgments’ of ‘character’ or ‘worthiness’ based on very limited information. To a certain degree we all do, and that’s usually a prejudice we only gradually overcome with age & wisdom. You’ll miss quite a few decent prospects if you’re neglecting or otherwise dismissing folks who are having a bad day (or perhaps even a bad month or quarter etc.), but who otherwise are quite decent ‘long term’ prospects as friends & contacts. Again, this is especially true in this miserable economy.
So as you age, you typically become ever more reluctant to view more people as ‘disposable’ to your wants & needs. Even if you may have made an earlier summary judgment about them. It’s a process of growth perhaps, and a recognition of the limitations of perfectibility in this world. Again, another conceit of youth. Much of life is just not very perfectible, no matter how well you plan & hope otherwise. ‘Man plans & G_d laughs…’
Just some thoughts. Cheers & Good Luck!, ‘VJ’
According to my mother, my father didn’t like her the first time they met (at a party), but she persisted when she ran into him again a few months later.
They were married in 1950 and they seemed pretty happy when I stopped by to visit them tonight.
I make jokes about them in my act but they are still in love, three kids, two grandkids, two houses, nine cars and four hundred medications later.
I have actually found that the opposite has happened to me. I am now in my upper 20’s (i know. i know. still not actually considered old).
Nevertheless – in my early twenties I would always give 2nd, 3rd, 4th and even more chances. If there was a “nice guy” I was dating I don’t think I would ever end it with them because maybe the boring conversation would turn to chemistry.
It never did and I was always relieved when they ended it with me.
Now, I feel like I have more confidence to trust my gut feelings. Yes, I make snap decisions (and it’s entirely possible that I give too much credence to the book Blink) but I think those initial instincts are almost always correct.
I think this kind of attitude is sad. We have such short attention spans these days and demand nothing less than love at first sight. While I think it’s usually true that you can assess physical attraction instantaneously, it takes longer than that to get a full picture of someone’s personality and intellect, especially if they’re on the shy side. And we all know stories of people who weren’t particularly drawn to each other when they met but, by developing a friendship, discovered that they couldn’t live without each other. It disturbs me to think that stories like this will probably become rarer and rarer as more and more people become convinced that they can’t fall in love unless they do so in the first five minutes.