Reply To: That very first date

[DragonEmbers]

The day before the date, write out some good questions or topics, keep them in your pocket (literally or mentally). If the conversation goes dry mid-date, excuse yourself to the bathroom, check your notes, and come back ready with 15 new things to talk about.

Spend a day on google maps. Set a 20 mile radius. Pick places in all directions from your location, so where ever the date might land you have a spot picked out already, know how to get there, the parking situation, etc.

That sounds like so much work. Good ideas for dating non-autistic people I guess, but the point of dating autistic people (for me at least) is to bypass stuff like this, for example, finding someone who is comfortable with silence during the date or straight-forward enough to just end the date if they can’t or don’t want to interact anymore. And the point of online dating is to show who we are ahead of time, so people who want us to be more talkative or continually going to new places skip us and we find someone more suitable.

Don’t you feel that artificially creating conversation like this is likely to backfire? If someone is not normally a chatty person, acting that way on a date is basically hiding one’s true self, which is not a good way to establish rapport.

Now? It’s all blank profiles and emojis.

This is actually a useful indicator: People who do not post anything about themselves are most likely a waste of time. Maybe they don’t take online dating seriously, maybe they don’t really know themselves, maybe they lack basic writing skills, maybe they are hiding their personality. Pass on all of them.