Thinking about dates. And not-dates.

[andrewducker]

Twice in the last couple of months I have had to reassure a woman that the upcoming meeting we are going to have is not a date.

Which perturbs me, as well amusing my inner language/social geek.

Perturbs because it does seem like a lot of people fall into the "Can men and women really be friends?" trope. Not that I'm blaming the women in these cases - I'm fairly sure that the issue came up because they'd hung out with someone before and then only found out in mid-hangout that the other person was going to try and pounce on them. And it sucks that apparently women can't spend some time with a person without having to worry that said person is going to lunge across the table like a velociraptor with a taste for tongue.

Amuses me because it feels so weird to think that one person can just arbitrarily declare something to be a date. That you could have offered to go to the cinema and then have someone suddenly say "Ha! You're in a date! I have ensnared you in a romantic situation and now you are honour-bound to go through with all of the traditions of dating which go along with that!" I really don't think that's how dates work, and I wouldn't expect that to do anything other than embarass the person who tried it. Ok, it might work on a sufficiently young person who had never had to deal with an awkward situation before. But I'd expect any adult to deliver the verbal equivalent of a swift kick to the libido, and then either leave or change the subject (depending on quite how much of a douche the date-entrapper was).

Not, I have to say, that I really understand dating. I've been on dates _with a partner_ before. Things where the two of us have gone out to spend a nice time in each other's company at a nice restaurant/bar/beach. But in my experience the whole "That was a date." thing happens retroactively. You spend some time hanging out with someone and discover that you like them, and then that time you spent together becomes the first date. Or you don't have a spark and so it wasn't. I've never defined the hanging out as a prospective interview in advance, where both of us went into it expecting to find out whether we liked the other.

(Julie will tell you that our first meeting was totally a date. I'd say it turned into one halfway through, but I actually invited her out for a chat, and hadn't hand any further intentions at that point. It was only when we clicked at the meal that I started having date-like thoughts and invited her for a drink afterwards.)

In any case - my general feeling is that either you're going to click (in which case it's quasi-date-like) or you're not going to click (in which case it's hanging out with an interesting* person), and no amount of up-front pre-definition is going to make a difference there.

Bearing all of which in mind, I can only assume that someone checking in advance that it's not a date is someone letting me know that they've already thought about it, they don't fancy me, and therefore I should ignore any sudden urges that I have to prepare my tongue for battle. They're just saying it in a way that's as non-confrontational as possible. Because most men are incapable of dealing with direct rejection.

*I certainly have no interest in doing any of this with someone who isn't interesting.

Comments

[jjhunter]

Speaking from my own experiences as a woman, I do the reflexive 'just checking that this one-on-one meeting you're proposing is actually a meeting, not a date' with guys I don't know as well not because I subscribe to the "Can men and women really be friends?" trope, but because a small but memorable minority of men have assumed on the slightest wedge of ambiguity (e.g. a non-date context any reasonable person would assume would not be a date, but had not explicitly been deemed 'not a date' beforehand) that I must be actively interested in potentially dating them or having a causal one night stand if I don't jump on every possible opportunity to make explicitly clear that no, this is just business / casual friendship / non-romantic interaction without option to switch romantic.

And this small but memorable minority of guys are just so much easier to deal with as a women if you can avoid giving them any intro to fixate on the possibility that you might have sex with them if they can just spend some threshold amount of time one-on-one with you.

Anyway, I'm glad you're aware enough to be perturbed by the lengths lots of us women have to go to deal with "Because most men are incapable of dealing with direct rejection." Please do what you can to help other guys be more aware of that, and perhaps one day we as a society will get to a point where one-on-time with a man and a women is assumed to be platonic as a default rather than sexual / romantic as a default.

[andrewducker]

In my ideal world neither platonic nor sexual would be the default. There would be no default, because people would be comfortable both rejecting and being rejected. Or, if not entirely comfortable, at least polite about it, and capable of still being friends.

[snippy]

I have a long-time friend who asked me out in the last few weeks, after finding out my marriage is ending. Yeah, I wondered and worried whether it was a date. And yeah, I asked him.

Because it has happened too many times that a man turned out to be a friend only so long as the possibility of more existed, and a friendship that I valued ended when the secret project of "get romantic with her" failed.

[andrewducker]

Asking him if it was, or asked him if it wasn't?

I get very annoyed when men fake a whole friendship. I mean, who does that?

[snippy]

I asked him it if was. He said no. We had a longer, more in-depth discussion over dinner. We are friends. I would have no objection to a long-time friendship developing into a romantic relationship. But not while I'm healing and changing my life right now.

Apparently a lot of men, based on what women write and say about it. And it has happened to me a dozen or more times in the last 40+ years (that is, the first time it happened I was 13, and I will be 55 on Sunday). I've also had stalkers. I don't actually think they're faking the whole friendship, they're just willing to walk away from a valued friendship when they get rejected for romance/sex. I don't know if it's from shame, fear of how the friendship will react to the request and rejection, anger, frustration--they never tell me those things.

I mean, I could do a whole rant on the horrible effects of patriarchy on men, how it messes up their odds of liking themselves, taking pride in their accomplishments, seeking/receiving compassion and help for their vulnerabilities. And that's outside of how patriarchy messes up sexuality and sexual relationships.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, rejection can hurt, and it can lead to a sudden negative reaction.

But you'd hope that any kind of decent adult would make an effort to get past that.

(Of course, I could be overestimating what percentage of people are decent adults.)

[altamira16]

A friend just went through this experience recently.

She was pining over someone, and she told him that she was interested in seeing a movie. He said he was also interested in that movie and agreed to go with her.

She assumed that it was a date.

He realized that he did not know if she had intended it as a date and told her that he had asked some friends to come along just to clarify.

She was very very sad that he was inviting friends and that it was not a date, but she went anyway.

His friends did not show up.

It was not a date. He told her he had a girlfriend.

[andrewducker]

It can definitely be confusing, and I suspect that some people will get upset over the lack of clarity.

But at least in this case he was making it clear that he didn't want to see her.

[redbird]

It's not necessarily that most men are incapable* of dealing with direct rejection in a civilized way (or that most women think that). It's that whether the fraction who won't handle it well is a majority, or one in three, or one in twenty, the ones who will react badly don't look different from the ones who will handle it well.

*where "incapable" often means "believe that they have nothing to lose by handling it badly": plenty of men who "can't handle direct rejection" when they ask a woman for a date can in fact handle direct rejection when someone decides not to hire them, or a male friend or relative refuses to lend them money.

[andrewducker]

Fair point. It only has to be a small percentage to put people off.

[birguslatro]

The obvious answer to the "Is this a date?" question, is "Do you want it to be?"

[andrewducker]

Which seems reasonable.

And the obvious answer to "This isn't a date is it?" is "Well, not now."

[birguslatro]

No, it's still "Do you want it to be?"

They're the one with dating on their mind, so it's up to them to explain why.

[marahmarie]

Huh. I don't like ambiguity in my relationships, so when asked out to the vague "movies" or "dinner" with no other discernible motives presented, I will ask flat-out, "Is this a date?" because inquiring minds, man, they wanna know.

And no, I've never been told No, it isn't. So I can't even say how I'd react if it wasn't!

[azurelunatic]

If I like someone, I might ask if it was a date.

If I like someone, and I'm nervous about it, and I'm afraid they're going to reject me, I might go "This isn't a date, is it?" to give them an excuse to turn me down and relieve my mind.

"Did you mean this to be a date?" might be my "I'm not that into you and we should get this straightened out posthaste" phrasing.