Searching for the Best Places to Meet Someone

The best places to meet people are ones in which

• You can see clearly, hear clearly, and respond honestly.
• You have an interest in what’s going on, increasing the likelihood that you’ll have something in common with anyone you meet there.
• The atmosphere feels safe and familiar.

It makes no sense to hang out in places where you hate the activity. Doing so is kind of like people who feed their babies Gerber’s veal and then are surprised when their kids like only veal, which the parents never eat. Hang out in places where you would be happy even if you weren’t searching, and — bingo! —you’re happy.
A place you enjoy, where you feel comfortable and safe, solves the problem of what to talk about. The key is to be lighthearted about approaching a stranger. The situation is similar to baking a soufflé. You need to tread gently and avoid loud noises, early peeks, or banging doors. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a dessert that nobody wants — flat, ugly, and unappetizing — despite the effort and right ingredients you put into it.

How to overcome shyness?

Most people are a little shy around new people, especially people to whom they’re attracted. A little shy is okay. A lot shy can keep you from the three fundamentals of dating: 1) getting out there, 2) taking chances, and 3) enjoying life. These are the three fundamentals to dating, so it’s important to shake that shyness if it’s getting in the way. To do that, here’s some stuff you can try:

• Meander around a busy public place for an hour or two so you get used to being around people.
• Practice smiling and making eye contact. Lift your chin off your chest and nonverbally connect with people who seem nice and interesting to you. (No touching; just look and smile.)
• Decide to chat with one new person a week. You can do this in the grocery store, the school cafeteria, or the line at the bank. Nothing breeds success like success.
  
• Act “as if.” If all people waited until they were totally comfortable before trying anything new, no one would do anything new! Pretend you’re not shy and act “as if” you’re full of confidence.
• Calm yourself by telling yourself over and over again that you’re safe and everything’s going to be okay. Say it aloud in private and in your head in public as often as necessary.
  
• Identify the worst-case scenario. What’s the most hideous thing that could happen if you walked up to someone you liked and said, “Hi”? Putting a face on your fear helps reduce it to a manageable size. For example, the worst thing that might happen is the person turns around and walks away. Yeah, rejection hurts, but you’re not going to die from it. Acceptance feels great, and you’ll never experience it if you don’t take a chance.
• Have fun! Shift the focus away from your own fears and zero in on what makes someone else tick. Before you know it, you’ll forget all about being shy.

A Word about Attitude — Yours

Before I begin listing some of the good places to find somebody fun, let me encourage you to be open — not open-minded about what I’m going to suggest, but open to spontaneity. If you’re in Macy’s and a great-looking person asks whether a particular color looks good with his or her hair, you should hear bells and whistles: potential date, potential date, potential date. Potential dates are everywhere, once you start looking. Just keep a few things in mind:

• Be aware. Both men and women are understandably cautious about being picked up by strangers, so if you’re the one doing the approaching, the hallmarks of your approach have to be gentility, civility, humor, and gentleness. Otherwise, somebody’s likely to call the cops on you. I know — so what’s the problem? Cops are cute. Pay attention here; I’m being serious.
• Be considerate. If someone has found the courage to approach you and you’re not interested, unless they’re really, really scary, say no civilly. You don’t have to be nasty.
• Don’t panic. If I were to promise you that you would meet the person of your dreams in ten years, and the two of you would be wildly happy for the rest of your lives, would you be willing to wait that ten years? Of course you would. So assume that meeting your dreamboat is just a matter of time and, in the meantime, have fun, which definitely increases your chances of being appealing when you run into that date-to-be ten minutes, months, years, or decades from now.

The Right Time for Dating

The best time to begin dating is when your life is really in gear, your friends think you’re swell, you’re relatively content with the way you look, work is going well, you’re even on speaking terms with your parents, and you can think of exes without raising your blood pressure. Hey, you’re ready. If you’re so allfired happy, why go through the hassle of dating, you ask. Good question, I respond. Because, let’s face it: The right person can make a good day great and a great day simply fabulous, and there is something about that chemistry thing. Following are some scenarios that may motivate you — happy, well-adjusted person that you are — to jump into the dating arena:

• Your friends are involved. Often the trigger to get you going is that all your friends are involved, and they seem really happy. Equally important, they also don’t have a whole lot of time for you these days, or at least not as much free time as you find yourself with — good motivating factor.
• You’re feeling great. Feeling much better about your life than you have for a long, long time — cheerfully assuming you’re stone cold sober and not high when you notice the feeling — is also a great time to begin. Remember, it’s always easiest to borrow money when you seem to not really need it, and the same is true with relationships. You’re your coolest self when you’re happy and relaxed. If you could bottle it, you’d be rich. You don’t have to bottle it, but you may want to spread it around.
• You’re in a new city. You’ve made new friends, you’re not on house arrest, there are new restaurants to experience, new parks in which to picnic, new museums to explore. Don’t substitute a search for dates before friends, but once the friends are in place, it’s quite kosher to mention that you’re new in town and looking — talk about your clean slate. Moving to a new city is a really good time to get in the swing. You’ll learn the city faster and have someone to share it with, someone who knows the sites taking you around. Be sure to leave some time for you to be by yourself. Although having someone along is great, time alone to explore your new surroundings is important, too. When you’re alone, you get to concentrate on the parts of the city that really interest you.
• It’s New Year’s Day. Although a New Year’s Eve party is a really treacherous first date experience, New Year’s Day itself can be a good reminder that time is marching on, and if you want someone marching with you in your parade, it’s a good time to push yourself a bit. (A New Year’s Day introduction also can make a great opening line: “I decided meeting you was going to be the first terrific thing I did for myself this year.”)
• A big event is coming up. A big deal event coming up in your life — a wedding, a party, an anniversary — can be a useful motivation to offset your lethargy or fear and inertia when it comes to dating. It can be a good opening gambit. If you feel compelled to take a date to the big event, do be a bit careful about making the big event the very first date. It’s quite possible to have a couple of date-ettes to break the ice before the big event. If possible, give yourself enough time to have a couple of dates or even a couple of months before the event.

The Wrong Time for Dating

The wrong time is any time when you’re feeling blue and lonely and sad and sorry for yourself — which is, of course, the time when all of us decide, “Okay, I need to find someone.” You may be particularly susceptible to this type of thinking when your boyfriend just dumped you, your girlfriend told you she just wants to be friends, you’ve just moved to a new city and are lonely, or any other time when attaching yourself to someone else sounds easier than being alone.

I know the songs all talk about “I want you, I need you, I love you,” but need means dependency, and if that’s how you set things up, you’ll distort any potential future you could have with someone. Either you will be nurtured (and thus less needy) and the whole reason for being together evaporates, or you’ll continue to be needy. What a drag — literally! Need is a lousy basis for anything other than employing a nurse; need won’t hold up for any length of time, and breaking up is always the pits. So pull yourself together and get yourself better before you even think about hooking up with someone else.
When you’re needy,

• Your feelings are so clouded by your pain that you can’t make sound choices regarding what you want.
• You ask another person to make you okay.
• You can’t see objectively what the other person is able or willing to give.
• Dating leaves you in a worse situation than you were in before.
• You can camouflage or ignore growth areas (for a while) that need and require your concentration.

When this relationship ends (which it’s bound to do), not only will you not be better off, but you’ll actually be worse off because you’ll have all your original issues to deal with in addition to anything that came up in this last relationship. If depression and anxiety were attractive and neediness were sexy, it would be okay to whine on a date, and everybody would fall madly in love. But you know that’s not the way the world works. Believe me when I say that the need to find another is the world’s worst reason to try to find another.
Following are some especially bad times:

• The death of a parent, a dog, your best friend, or anybody you feel close to. The human psyche needs to reaffirm its mastery over death, so the impulse not to be alone and sometimes even to mate can be really strong when you’re feeling bereft. Unfortunately, another person can’t act as a human bandage. You need to be able to embrace the sorrow of loss and let it go before you can resume your normal life. Not only can beginning a dating experience with someone before you’ve healed mess up a potentially good situation, but it can slow the healing process as well.
• You’ve just lost your job. First things first. You need to find another job, not a date. Because both a new date and a new job take time to find and time to get used to, stabilize before you add a complication. Because you won’t starve without a date and you may starve without a job, get the job first. Additionally, getting fired feels lousy, and finding a job feels good. You want to feel stable and healthy, not like somebody’s charity case, before you begin dating.
• The loss of a place to live. This may seem like a really good excuse to latch onto somebody who has a place to live and a bed and a stable existence, but that n word (need, for those of you not paying attention) has to be a tip-off. Need is not good to put on another soul. I want you. Yes! I love you. Yes! I need you. No, no, no! If you don’t have a place to live, you don’t have a place to take a date, a place to sleep, a place to get phone calls at night —all that’s pretty basic. So take care of the basics and then go for it.
• You’re depressed. There are times when all of us feel lost and alone and out of tune with the Universe. The priority at that moment is to get back in tune, not to find a human teddy bear to keep the monsters at bay. Being depressed doesn’t mean you’re hopeless; it just means that dating is going to tax resources that are stretched pretty thin already. If you’ve been feeling really sad and bummed for more than a week or two; if you can’t eat, sleep, or concentrate; if you cry easily and feel hopeless and tired all the time; and if things that used to make you happy really don’t anymore, the cure isn’t a date — it’s a therapist and medication. No kidding. Those are signs of a serious, but very treatable, illness. However, the prescription isn’t a hug; it’s some important work so you won’t feel like that again.
• You’ve just broken up with someone. There is a piece of folk wisdom that says if you’ve just been thrown from a horse, the best cure is to get right back on. That may work really well with horses, but don’t even think about applying it to dating situations. If you’ve just broken up with someone, don’t use another person as proof that you’re still lovable. It’s not fair to you, and it’s not fair to the human aspirin you’re using to make your headache go away, at least temporarily. Think of going to your bank and trying to borrow money. If you go in looking all raggedy and dirty and seedy, do you think the bank is going to loan you money? No way. If there isn’t some indication that you’ll be able to pay back the loan, the loan officer may feel sorry for you but won’t loan you money. Relationships are based on surprisingly similar theories. Somebody looking to get involved with you expects to give but also to get something back, and expects you to show a little interest (pardon the rather obvious pun). If you’re getting the idea that misery is not a very good motivation to date, you’re exactly right.

A personal ad with no purse strings attached

Here I want you to use the gimmick simply to get in touch with you. The major distinction between a real personal ad and this exercise is that real ads are limited in number of words and just focus on the tip of the iceberg. Without these restrictions, you can look well below the H2O level.

One of the quickest ways to make sure that what you’re advertising for and what you want are the same is to write a personal ad that is just for fun and practice and that will, most likely, never see the light of day. A personal ad can tell you very quickly whether what you want and how you’re advertising are out of whack. If you’re looking for someone with whom to settle down, for example, then looks should be less important to you than stability, sincerity, and fertility. If you love to travel, you shouldn’t be trolling for a homebody. To use your personal ad for this exercise, look at what you said you wanted in your mate (your fantasy) and what you said about yourself (your reality). Look for compatible or complementary traits.

For example, if you listed that you want stability and commitment in your About Me section but listed adventurous risk-taker in the About Him/Her section of the ad, you’ve got some work to do in order to achieve some semblance of compatibility. In determining whether the lists are compatible, look for overlap in words or ideas. If you see “fun-loving” in your list, you probably want to see “fun-loving” — or a concept like it — in the fantasy date’s list, too; be careful if your fantasy date’s list includes qualities that conflict with yours, like “down-to-earth and serious.” You’ll think of them as a stick-in-the-mud, and they’ll see you as frivolous, flirtatious, and untrustworthy.

You may be saying to yourself, “Hey look, I’m only talking about a date.” But don’t go off in a direction that makes no sense (why date someone of another faith if you would never allow yourself to fall in love with that person or marry out of the faith? Why date someone who smokes if you hate smoking?) unless you simply want a diversion, which is expensive in terms of time and energy and emotion. Of course, if you want to do that, it’s fine with me. Just make sure that you make your intentions clear upfront to all parties concerned, including yourself.

If you’re not sure what you want, it’s okay to experiment, but make sure that your uncertainty isn’t based on an unwillingness to face up to who you are and what you want. That’s an expense none of us can afford. Because this ad isn’t going anyplace, don’t worry about how many words you use, but do make sure that you’re not avoiding reality by tap-dancing with a lot of words. Are you looking for romance or companionship or commitment? Don’t tell me all of the above, because they’re really not the same thing.

If your ad sounds like every ad that you’ve ever read, start again. This is you. The real you, the honest you, the specific you. No one ever has to see what you really want, but doing this exercise can focus you in a very helpful way. What you’re looking for in your personal ad is something that really says you. The fact that you love grape jelly and Bob Dylan and are allergic to cats says a lot more than that you like moonlight and long romantic walks on a beach. Puhl-leeeeze. If there was ever a time not to be trite, it’s when you’re talking about yourself and who you are and what you want. Don’t worry that you’re being too specific.

If your ad seems too picky, you can always modify it and try that approach for a while or rely on the Fates and chemistry to steer you. Keep in mind, though, that a little bit of that unwillingness to take responsibility goes a long way. So do be careful. Do not be tempted to send this ad anywhere. Personal ads can certainly jazz up your social life, but don’t waste the time or the money on a personal ad until you have a bit of conventional dating under your belt. You want to make sure that you have most of the details worked out before you take the act on the road.

Tuck the ad away in your notebook for a while and go on to the next chapter. If, after dating for a year or so, you feel like you know what you’re doing but would like to widen the dating pool, you’ll be prepared. Do read the ad again to make sure that everything is accurate in terms of how you see yourself and your prospective date. (Of course, it certainly should have changed a bit once you’ve been out there — nothing’s quite as valuable as a bit of experience.) You’re now most of the way through armchair dating. Just a bit more and you can get out there and strut your stuff.

Being the real you

Once you’re aware of who you are, you can begin working on how you’re you. You can look at your body language, your wardrobe, your vocabulary, your tone of voice, your fears, and your desires and make sure that there is some consistency between what you truly want and what your behavior indicates you want. It’s amazing how often we all give out the wrong clues in an attempt to pretend to be someone we’re not. When you’re more knowledgeable about yourself, you can hold a mirror up to your behavior and see what others see —and respond to. Think about how you present yourself and determine whether you send out signals that are consistent with what you want.

Are you timid and looking at the floor or confident and covering up sweaty palms with a bit of swagger? Are you noisy because you’re fearful no one will listen to you, or do you whisper so that people have to stand close because you’re afraid of your own power? Do you stoop to appear short or fluff your hair to appear bigger?