Dear reader,
In my long prestigious career as a single man, I’ve had a lot of dates and I’ve had a lot of women.
My problem is that I have gone on no more than half of scheduled first dates. Why? Because half the time I make a date with a woman, she either does not show (happened to me about a dozen times), or she cancels (and sometimes attempts to reschedule).
This morning, I woke up to the following email: "After we spoke yesterday I checked messages and email only to realize that I spoke too soon about meeting for dinner this evening. I have several additional job interviews b4 weeks end and need to stay focused. With that said, a rain check and perhaps coffee early next week? Let me know your availability and have a great weekend."
I can’t remember ever trying to reschedule a first date. It’s probably happened but I can’t think of when I initiated this. So am I correct in intuiting that 99% of the time when women try to reschedule a first date (even when it’s a first date that they initiated), they are playing some game? I understand that sometimes things do come up and get in the way, but because this rescheduling happens to me so often (on my first attempts at dating, at age 14, the girl, Denise Bernard, twice in a row had to go to a horse show, by the third time she was so worn down that she went to the San Francisco Giants game with me and my friends and had a lousy time), I believe I have stumbled on to a great insight into human nature.
Incidentally, this happened to me just as often before Google, so I don’t think this is primarily a matter of their reading my body of work and becoming horrified.
Khunrum emails: "Luke, perhaps you could give us some insight into a Luke Ford "DATE"…I imagine such an outing to be extremely underfunded. Like a glass of water and a small dinner salad. You don’t pick them up in the van do you? You meet them at a restaurant right? Denny’s….I-Hop? ….and The Hovel…when do you spring The Hovel on them? I’m sure if they had a choice they’d prefer an evening at the Bates Motel. I’d love you to give us the misha goss on a typical Luke Ford date…The ones they don’t cancel out on."
Luckily, I have an expert on women who I can turn to in these times of trouble — David "The Mac" Klinghoffer.
He pimps for the Washington Post on March 28, 1993:
As my unmarried male friends and I have discovered in the course of trying to get dates, there is something archetypal going on in the minds of women, ages 23 to 30, living in major American cities. Emily Post, meet Dr. Jung.
Never mind all the talk about feminism; we men in our twenties are expected to ask women out on dates, and definitely not the other way around. Stranger than that is this: When a man proposes a first date, he is never, but never, turned down on the spot. Instead, for the woman who doesn’t want to go out with a particular man, it has become the prescribed social form to accept his offer anyway. The woman then waits until the day of the date, calls the man at his workplace between five hours and 15 minutes prior to the appointed time and cancels.
This is an unremarked-on development in mating rituals and should probably be left to academic sociologists for proper digestion and analysis. What interests me are the excuses women inevitably offer when breaking that first or second date. A woman never says, "I’ve thought it over and decided I’d rather sit at home and bleach my mustache." She never says – plausible as it may be – "It has only now dawned on me that you are a world-class geek." What she does say, I’ve found, can be classified into three major patterns. Discounting the possibility that leading colleges issue a secret primer to graduating women – "How to Avoid Unwanted Dates Without Ever Having to Say No" – these patterns are most likely subliminal in origin and repeated over and over again: They are, in a word, archetypes.
"You’ll never believe who just dropped in . . . ."
There is, above all, the pattern of the Unexpected Guest. My friend Henry, a headhunter for corporate lawyers in New York, tells of the 30-year-old real estate lawyer who called an hour before the two of them were to get together for dinner. Her father had decided to make a surprise visit from Pittsburgh.
Brian emails:
My problem has been that they show up and I wish I’d stayed home.
I think your problem is that you really haven’t generated any excitement on the part of the woman in meeting you. You really have to make them feel as though the first date is going to be the last first date they’ll ever be on for them to even show up.
You need to spend more time priming them and showing them that meeting you will be so much fun they won’t want to be anywhere else. If you don’t do that–forgettaboutit as they say on TV.
He has to understand, women have the goodies, women control the goodies, men want those goodies, you have to make it worth their while to let you have access to their goodies.
And being a nice guy won’t get you anywhere.