Beware of anticipation

One of the most profound dating survival books ever written is Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo's 'He's just not that into you'. These dating gurus shed light on many of courtship's mysteries with very simple, logical explanations. They help daters understand why what seemed like a perfectly reasonable first date never culminated in a second, why men can be sexual even when they aren't attracted to the person they're sexual with, and more importantly, why not to take rejection too personally. It's an absolute must for anyone who's in the dating jungle.

What the book does not do, however, is guide hapless pre-daters. There is clear market demand for some niche material on how to limit anticipation before the first date, and, even more importantly, how to make educated decisions regarding whether you WANT to go on that date or not in the first place.

When friends introduced me to men in the past, it was clear that the first phone call had a single objective: to set up the first meeting. As such, there was no burning need to impress or spend time getting to know one another on the phone before going on the date. That's not to say that the first call isn't important – I was recently told that it was my chatty, friendly phone manner on an initial call made my suitor far more eager to meet me than he had been before we spoke.

But with Internet dating, things are not nearly as black and white. The phone call is the last 'test' left before making a decision to take things a step further and actually meet. And many a good potential dater has fallen at this critical phase. Yet even getting to a point where there IS a phone call is a fairly advanced stage in the Internet dating relationship.

First you need to make contact on a site. Then you need to get a response (certainly not a given thing – I would estimate only 10-15% of people respond at all, and at least a third of them just respond with a polite "just-not-that-interested" email). Once the 'reach-out' and 'initial response' phases are through, there tends to be a period of varied length where emails or text messages are exchanged. This is often the phase where candidates drop like flies. Bad spellers, incoherent authors, even people who take so long to respond you can't remember what their profile looked like – all can easily result in elimination from the dating game. And then someone pops the question: "Can I have your number?".

This is the point where my first warning is definitely called for. When initially embarking on the journey of Internet dating, the email phase can take weeks or months. Certainly for me, this was the most intriguing phase of the cyber-dating process, where witty writers sent short, funny notes all day long and there was an excited sense of being wooed constantly. The anticipation grew and grew until you simply HAD to meet, and often it just took an initial glance at one another in person to realize that there was absolutely no chemistry and that all the writing back and forth had been in vain.

I clearly remember a vacation I took in South Africa where I met someone via computer just before I left. Since there was no time to meet face-to-face before my vacation, we chatted on messenger while I was away, with the intention of meeting on my return. The chatting rapidly progressed from the exchange of a quick note in the morning and night to constant emailing and obsessive checking of the messenger throughout the day, not to mention enormous phone bills due to excessive trans-Atlantic text messaging. We communicated beautifully, he made me laugh out loud with his witty retorts, and the anticipation was so intense by the time I returned from my trip, I almost asked him to meet me at the airport.

One of the funniest things he did at the time was his response to my request for a photograph (While I'm not obsessed with how my dates look, I do like to be able to recognize them when we meet). His response was to send a picture of himself from thirty years before - the cutest four year old I'd ever seen. That should have set off alarm bells rather than butterflies deep inside, but in my naïve way I simply thought that if he had been such a cute kid, he surely couldn't have changed that much.

Alas, all it took was one face-to-face meeting to realize that not only had he not grown up into anything to write about, but I strongly suspect that even the picture of the four year old was not of him but of some other child. Three weeks of anticipation were extinguished with three minutes of personal contact, and we parted ways so I could rush home and delete all the needless correspondence that had preceded the disastrous date.

This leads me to the next warning – people who refuse to send photos don't want to be seen. Of course, you could interpret their reluctance as them being so good looking they don't want people to date them for their physical appearance alone. I'm sure that happens once in a millennium. However, the likelihood is far greater that they don't think you'll date them if you see how they look. There are many excuses for not sending pictures – they just got a new computer so they don't have a photo; they really aren't photogenic so they refuse to have photos taken; or my favourite, they will only send a photo once they've seen YOURS (then you never hear from them again). I don't really get this one – surely if you intend to meet in person anyway, and you don't think they'll go for your look, would you prefer to be rejected via email on the basis of your photograph rather than in a face-to-face meeting, where your actual personality has come into the equation as well?

And now for my final warning: ignore the little voices that arise in your head after a good phone call, whispering 'he's the one' in your head before you've even met him. Those little buggers are there to mess with you, and you can never know that someone is the man of your dreams until you've spend time with him. Overblown anticipation for a first date is a sure-fire way to kill any chance you had in the first place. No first date can live up to the expectation that the one meeting will be the beginning of the rest of your married life. Take your anticipation and crumple it up into a little ball of interest, then stick it in your back pocket till you've gotten to know your mystery man. And don't worry, that little bundled ball will not go away all together. It won't even crease – it will simply pop back up again when the time is really right.