Shut Up and Date!
I give a lot of dating advice to my friends (whether they ask for it or not) and the one useful piece of advice that I find myself repeating is this: curb all compulsions to over communicate, especially early on in a relationship.
What constitutes “early on in a relationship”? In my experience, I didn’t gain the beginnings of real comfort with someone until about two to three months into the relationship. I’ve studied the relationships of friends, colleagues, and analyzed (deeply) the wealth of dates and relationships I’ve had and noticed that this timeline is pretty common.
Deep dark secrets and defining experiences are heavy topics to share with someone you’ve only met, say, four times in your life. I’ve never fully trusted anyone that quickly, and you should only discuss these sorts of things with someone you trust to understand why you’re sharing it in the first place. You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache this way.
This might be a controversial view. In today’s world, expressing ourselves about every little thing that bothers us is encouraged and doing the opposite is even frowned upon. To pacify anyone who thinks this is dangerous advice, let me throw out the following disclaimers: communication — even over communication — is a necessary exercise when it comes to laying down your physical and emotional boundaries, discouraging bad behavior, or curbing any brand of disrespect. I’m not talking about those instances today.
This is what I’m talking about:
Stop talking about your past relationships.
No one cares, least of all the person you’re dating currently. For example, on the fifth date you tell your fun new prospect that your last boyfriend cheated on you and now you don’t know if you can trust anyone again. Buzzkill. Also, what does that have to do with the person you’re sharing a delicious fondue with right now? Nothing.
When you tell your new love interest something like this, what you’re actually telling them is that you think they are untrustworthy. No one wants to be in a relationship with someone with ready-made trust issues. If you can’t trust a potential new boyfriend because of a past boyfriend, you need therapy, not a night on the town with a stranger with mysterious motives.
Additionally, in a round-about way, you’re stereotyping them against a person they don’t know and a person they aren’t. You’re also giving them a mountain to climb when they don’t even know if they even want to see the pinnacle yet.
We all have scars from past loves or near-loves, but these scars should stay hidden in the beginning. Not because you’re ashamed of them, not because they’re not great to look at, but because in a relationship’s infancy the focus should be on assessing whether or not you have a future with a person based on how well you both gel, not on using the past to predict their behavior and the trajectory of a relationship that is just getting its sea legs.
Sharing the negative traits of your ex is also a red flag that you have lingering feelings or unfinished business with this ex, and that’s a bad place to kick off a relationship.
Leave your expectations at the door.
Another mistake I often see people make is initiating long drawn out conversations, on date seven, for example, about “where things are going.” Who the hell knows that early on? To be honest, no one should know at that point. It takes time to get to know someone. It takes time for the mask to fall off. It takes time to determine whether a relationship is for the long, or short haul.
Rather than spending every moment analyzing the new prospect’s texting frequency, the word count of said texts, if they want something serious or not, etc., figure out if you actually like spending time with them. Do they make you laugh? Are they good conversationalists? Do they curse too much or too little? Use the gut early on to determine these things first, because if you don’t know the answers to the mundane questions like this, you shouldn’t be trying to lock them down into a serious relationship just yet.
No one can tell the future, and constantly talking about the direction of your very new relationship saps the novelty out of a fresh new experience and all the surprises it has in store.
If it’s meant to go somewhere substantial, it will — whether you talk about it for hours in the beginning — or not. In fact, I’ve found that when people talk about the course of a relationship too much it creates heavy expectations that your prospect may not be ready for, and in that case you’ve killed things before they can even start.
Go with the flow, the rest will follow.
I’m engaged now. Our relationship flowed — and not always in a straight line, toward the place we are now. What I remember about the early days with my fiance is that we took our time. We hung out when we wanted to. We didn’t discuss the future because we were enjoying one another in the present. I didn’t discuss my past and all the exes that haunt it because they’re dead to me and so is the past (literally, it doesn’t exist in the present).
When we realized that we liked being with one another more than we liked being with anyone else, we discussed monogamy. It was a spur of the moment conversation and it said everything that we needed to know about where we were headed.
Time and time again, I’ve seen successes both in my dating life and that of my peers when they simply relinquished the control that they thought over communicating brought them.
So, I say all that to say: shut up and date.
