CHANGING THE STORY
On some level, I also wondered “why bother?” Of course, I knew happily married people who didn’t have great first dates, but somehow I expected a memorable one when I met my spouse. I’ve certainly not been above reading into things on a first date. Once I was really excited after meeting a guy because we discovered that we both ate the same obscure brand of chocolate chip cookies for breakfast (“How weird is that? It’s destiny!”). But that didn’t mean we were soul mates; it just meant we had the same poor nutritional habits. By date three, we realized we had little in common besides those cookies. Still, the more I heard people tell these stories of how they “just knew” when they first met, the more I bought into the idea that these kinds of beginnings make for happier marriages.
Diane Holmberg, a Canadian researcher and professor who studies relationships, says that’s not true and, in fact, the first date stories I hear might not even be that accurate. She’s found that married couples often change their courtship stories over time. In her book Thrice Told Tales: Married Couples Tell Their Stories, she and her coauthors analyzed how couples described their courtship in the first, third, and seventh years of marriage. It turns out their stories weren’t consistent.
“I selected a set of couples who showed a major drop in their overall marital well-being,” she explained. “I then selected a second set of couples who were matched with the first set in marital well-being that first year, but stayed stable over time. I then looked at how couples talked about the early stages of their relationship.”
By the third year, she found, the stable group’s courtship stories had gotten more positive than they’d reported that first year, while the less happy group’s courtship stories had gotten more negative than they’d been in that first year. But remember: That first year, these courtship stories had been identical in tone. In other words, happy couples described the early stages of their relationship more positively over time, while couples who became less happy described those early stages more negatively over time.
These weren’t just first-date memories—they covered first dates up to the proposal—but it does show, Holmberg says, that there’s a kind of revisionist history going on.
Is Lucia’s first-date story accurate? I don’t know—I didn’t know her ten years ago when she met her husband. But either way, I knew I had to change the way I viewed the first date as the forecaster of my future with each guy.
Grace, who has been married for six years, knows that first dates can be misleading.
“I literally heard a voice when I met my husband,” she told me. “It said, ‘You will marry him and have a son.’ Every time I was near him, the world stopped and I felt so connected to him.”
They do have a son now, just like the voice said—but the connection didn’t prove lasting and they’re in the process of getting a divorce.
“The bottom line is that I really didn’t know him,” she admitted now.
On a recent episode of the radio show This American Life, I heard the story of a couple who had this incredibly romantic love-at-first-sight meeting and a movie-worthy courtship, only to be followed by a marriage far more difficult than either expected. It got so hard that they almost split up, but instead chose to work through their differences to create what’s now a strong marriage. In an interview, the man commented that because he and his wife had such an amazing love-at-first-sight story, people always want to hear about that—but in his view, they’re asking the wrong question.
“Everyone always asks how we met,” he said, “but nobody ever asks how we stayed together.”
I WOULDN’T RETURN HIS CALLS
Then there’s Julie, who had no fireworks whatsoever when she met her husband, Jeff. In fact, she didn’t even want to have coffee with him. They first met not at a romantic restaurant, but in an intensive care unit in North Carolina, at a patient’s bedside. Julie was the doctor, and Jeff was the nurse.
After their bedside meeting, Jeff left a couple of messages on Julie’s answering machine, but she didn’t return the calls because she didn’t feel there was a polite way to say, “No thanks.” She was sure she had no romantic interest in Jeff, and because they might run into each other at the hospital, rejecting him felt awkward.
Then, one night, as Julie was getting ready to join friends from work at a baseball game, Jeff called for what he later said was his third and final attempt.
“It was the perfect gracious response to the date I didn’t think I wanted to go on,” Julie said. “I invited Jeff to join the group from work—all folks he knew anyway.” In other words, the perfect non-date.
But as they sat on a grassy knoll in the outfield, they lost track of the game completely.
“We chatted like old friends,” she said. “We laughed about similarities in our upbringing. He was comfortably familiar. Neither of us dated anybody else after that night.”
They’ve been married for twelve years.
“Jeff was the package that arrived at my doorstep a couple of times,” Julie said, “but it wasn’t until he was unwrapped and just sitting there that I could see what a treasure he was.”
THE FROG PRINCE
Helena Rosenberg, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles with an expertise in counseling single women seeking mates, calls men like her own husband Frog Princes—people you don’t naturally think of as your potential mate on first glance but who turn out to be princes as you get to know them.
Jennifer, who is 36 and met her husband seven years ago, is married to a Frog Prince.
“I was at a party and I didn’t even notice Danny,” she said, referring to her husband. “I noticed another guy. I dated the other guy and became friends with Danny. Soon I realized that Danny was the more impressive guy. He just didn’t have the kinds of attributes that can be seen from across the table on a first date. The best husbands are the ones who have these unseen qualities, the kind of things you’ll see over time, like kindness, patience, generosity, and honesty.”
Scott Haltzman, a psychiatrist at Brown University and the author of The Secrets of Happily Married Women: How to Get More Out of Your Relationship by Doing Less, told me from his office in Providence that it’s important for women to learn this when they’re just starting to date.
“My own clinical observation is that first impressions are not a strong predictor of marital success,” he said. “I’ve got a seventeen-year-old daughter, and she’ll say she went out with a guy and he was boring. I say, ‘Great, boring’s good! Better that than bad boys. If you didn’t feel a sense of danger or a wave of nausea, go out again. People mistake the nausea for interest, but if you can objectively tell yourself that a guy has some good qualities, go out again. It can take several dates just to figure out whether there’s something interesting about this person. And then you may find you’re truly attracted to him.”
That reminded me of something Anne Meara of the comedy team Stiller and Meara once said in a New York Times interview about her thirty-plus-year marriage: “Was it love at first sight? It wasn’t then—but it sure is now.”
HE LOOKED SHORT—IN A HEADSHOT
By now it sounds obvious: First meetings tell us very little. But I’m guessing that if Cosmo ran a quiz consisting of first-date stories, and then asked readers to guess which led to happy marriages, which led to unhappy marriages, and which led to no marriage at all—many of us would fail. Take the story of Tracey and Phil. She wouldn’t even meet the man who became her husband because, when she Googled him, he looked short—in a headshot.
Tracey, who is now 32, told me over the phone from Philadelphia that her mother knew Phil’s mom, and wanted to set them up.
“My mom said he was a good guy who came from a good family, and that he had graduated from law school and was practicing,” Tracey explained. So she went to his law firm’s Web site and, based on the two-inch headshot, assumed that Phil was short.
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sp; “I didn’t believe my mom when she said Phil was tall,” Tracey explained, “because she’s not interested in height. She was looking for someone who would be a good companion. I want that, but I have to be attracted, and my type is tall guys.”
Meanwhile, Phil had similar reservations. “My mom said that Tracey was very bright and had a master’s from NYU. She said she was a good person and she had pretty eyes, so I assumed that meant the rest of her, well . . . not so much.”
When they finally did meet—at a holiday party in their home-town over a Christmas break—they both felt vindicated. Even though Phil turned out to be 6’5”, neither of them was impressed.
“I felt stupid that I assumed he was short,” Tracey said. “But there definitely was no spark. I didn’t have that instant, Wow, I want to talk to him feeling.”
Phil was equally lukewarm about Tracey. “She had big curly hair, and that was not a good thing. She looked like a poodle.”
After some friendly but unmemorable conversation, Tracey, who is naturally outgoing, asked for Phil’s business card. She thought Phil was a smart, decent guy and maybe they’d get together the next time they were in town.
“I had no romantic expectations not only because there seemed to be no chemistry between us, but also because we lived in different states,” Tracey said. She was living near Washington, D.C., and he was living in New Jersey. “I was definitely not interested romantically, but I thought since our families knew each other, he might become a friend.”
When Tracey did eventually call Phil, the conversation went surprisingly well. “If she hadn’t called me,” Phil said, “I wouldn’t have sought her out.” But suddenly they found themselves talking on the phone, long-distance, consistently for a month.
Phil was calling her daily, but Tracey still didn’t see this as having romantic potential. “I still just thought he was a really great guy and I was making a really good friend,” she said.
Phil wasn’t sure what to think, but over a long weekend, Phil went to visit his mother in Maryland and, on the way home, stopped through Tracey’s neighborhood to meet her for dinner. This time, there was more interest, but neither had that struck-by-lightning feeling. The attraction, Tracey said, was “more mellow.”
“We’d been talking on the phone for about a month,” Phil said, “so I knew her better. She looked better, too, but only because I knew her better.”
“I felt the same way,” Tracey added. “We’d become friends. And that added to the attraction. If we hadn’t taken the time to get to know each other, I still might have felt nothing.”
After that, the two had several conversations each day. Phil would drive down to D.C. every weekend he could. Despite the distance, or perhaps because of it, Tracey and Phil used to joke that they talked to each other more than most couples in the same location do.
“He was always accessible,” Tracey said. “That meant a lot to me. Other boyfriends I had were attractive and successful, but what I was missing was that they didn’t treat me well. They weren’t nice people. They looked good, had good jobs, came from decent families—but weren’t decent people. They were arrogant. Phil was always nice to me, always there for me. I never had to wonder if he was going to call me back or worry about any of those games.”
Now that they’re married, they seem like typical blissed-out newlyweds, but they’re also quick to say that they each had to make some compromises.
“She’s a great person because I see her as a true partner, an equal,” Phil said. “She’s equally smart, has a great sense of humor. We have fun together. She makes me better and want to be better. But I also think that she’s overly sensitive sometimes. If I had my ideal list, maybe that wouldn’t be on it. We work through it, though, because we’re truly interested in understanding each other.”
Tracey cops to being too emotional, and says that she appreciates how patient Phil is with her. If she could change one thing about Phil, it would be that he’s not as “on it” as she’d like.
“He likes that I’m type A, because I keep track of all the bills and things that need to get done,” she said. “But I don’t like how laid-back he is all the time. In a perfect world, I’d like to see him have a little more urgency with things. Sometimes I feel like I want to put a Post-it on my forehead so he’ll remember things and not procrastinate. But he puts up with me, so fair is fair. We’re a team.”
Phil and Tracey had that romantic energy I crave—finishing each other’s sentences, being gentle with each other’s vulnerabilities, having enough comfort to laugh at their respective less-than-appealing qualities. How sad it would be, I thought, if they hadn’t gotten past their first impressions.
Tracey thinks about this, too. “I tell my friends who are single that if the person is reasonably cute and seems like a good, smart person, you have to go on a second date, even if he’s not your type or the date was boring or you didn’t feel anything. And if they protest, I say, look at me and Phil.”
THREE HUNDRED FIRST-DATE MISTAKES
He’s not my type. The date was boring. I didn’t feel anything. These are just three reasons women give for never seeing a guy again. Evan Marc Katz, the dating coach, told me that the list can get outrageously long.
“I sent out an e-mail to women because I wanted to find out for men what guys were doing wrong on first dates,” Evan said. “I thought I’d get a list of a few things: The guy didn’t pay. He was rude to the waiter. He didn’t ask about her life. But they sent back three hundred things! I didn’t even know there were three hundred things I could do wrong on a first date. Ten, maybe. But not three hundred! Imagine how picky you have to be to be able to name so many things that would make you not go on a second date.
“But they said things like, ‘He shouldn’t talk in any other voice, even if he does the greatest Austin Powers impression in the whole world’ and ‘He shouldn’t tell her that nothing will stop him from watching the big game’ and ‘He shouldn’t wear a brown belt and black shoes, or vice versa.’ I tried this with men, and they only named a few things that wouldn’t lead to a second date: She wasn’t attractive enough. She wasn’t stimulating enough. She wasn’t warm.”
For women, he said, the problem seems to be that we don’t realize we’re just on a date. As Evan put it, “A woman thinks, ‘Is he my husband?’ That’s a much higher bar than just, ‘Should we go out on a second date?’ A guy will ask you out on a second date if he thinks you’re cute and he had fun. From what I’ve seen, women are much more judgmental in a first-date situation.”
CONFUSING GOOD DATERS WITH GOOD HUSBANDS
Dr. Michael Broder, the therapist in Philadelphia who spoke to me about entitlement, said that those unreasonable expectations start at the first date.
“Almost everyone knows someone who’s happily married but where there weren’t sparks flying at the beginning of the relationship,” he said. “But a lot of women go on a first date and say, ‘I need passion upfront and if it’s not there, have a nice life.’ They don’t want to wait to see if something develops on a second or third date. They want it all, right now, and they don’t have the patience for guys who don’t make the best impression immediately. He either dazzles her or she doesn’t want to see him again.”
Dr. Broder believes that women often confuse good daters with good husbands and, conversely, bad daters with bad husbands. We forget that the guy who is awkward or too quiet or not funny on a first date might be acting that way because he’s excited about you, not because he’s a moron. In fact, he could turn out to be a really cool guy. The guy who doesn’t wow you with his smooth dating skills might wow you as a loving husband. The smooth operator, on the other hand, might not turn out to be such a great husband. Courtship skills, especially on a first date, aren’t a good predictor of what kind of husband a guy will make.
That’s why Lisa Clampitt, the New York City matchmaker, told me that if a client is on
the fence after a first date, she’ll strongly encourage a second. She doesn’t require it, but she makes it clear to both parties beforehand that if the interaction is “neutral,” you can’t go wrong with a second try. Sometimes people are nervous on first dates. Sometimes they feel as though they have only one shot, like in a job interview, and they’re too focused on landing the second date to relax on the first. But if the second date is a given, the first interaction can be more natural. And even if the first interaction is natural but the sparks aren’t there—like with Mike and me—she feels that the dynamic often changes on a second date, and you may view each other differently once you’ve already met.
If, on the other hand, the first date is “super-negative,” Clampitt talks to her clients to understand why.
“Sometimes, I understand,” she said. “At the same time, I don’t want them to be unreasonable and miss an opportunity.”
I asked her what advice she’d give to a friend of mine who went on a first date with a guy she described as cute and smart and well-traveled, but who “wasn’t a fabulous conversationalist.” As my friend put it, “The date was a bit like twenty questions. There were some awkward ‘what next?’ pauses.” She didn’t want to go on the second date.
Clampitt sighed through the phone line. “What do people expect when they’re meeting someone for the first time?” she asked. “That you’ll have the same comfort level that you do with people you already know? Sometimes a first conversation flows easily, but often, it’s not until the second or third or fourth date that it starts to feel more natural. We give our coworkers or potential new friends the benefit of the doubt when we meet for the first time, even if those first interactions aren’t super-exciting. Why not potential mates?”
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