First Dates: Stop Auditioning, Start Deciding

By Elena Vella | Love, Life & Relationships

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There is a man I went on a first date with — this was years ago, Sydney, a bar in Surry Hills with exposed brick and overpriced negronis — who spent forty minutes telling me about his ex-wife. Not in the way that signals depth. In the way that signals he was still married to her in every room that mattered. I sat across from him thinking: *I already have the answer. I just have to wait for the question to finish.*

That is the thing nobody tells you about first dates. The question is not *will this person like me?* The question is *do I want to see this person again?* Those two things feel identical when you are anxious and hopeful and wearing the shoes that hurt. They are, in fact, completely opposite orientations. One makes you perform. The other makes you pay attention.

I have sat with hundreds of clients over the years — in the clinic, in court mediations, in the quiet aftermath of marriages that ended without anyone quite knowing when they started going wrong — and the pattern I see most consistently is this: people enter first dates as though they are the candidate, not the interviewer. They rehearse answers. They wear the self they think will be chosen. They optimise for approval rather than information. And then they are surprised, six months later, to find themselves in a relationship with someone they never actually assessed.

Anxious attachment does this. It hijacks the executive function — the rational, observing part of you that is perfectly capable of noticing red flags — and replaces it with a single relentless directive: *make them like you*. The anxiously attached person is so busy auditioning that they forget to watch the show. They get home from the date flushed and hopeful, replay every exchange, wonder if they said the wrong thing, and never once ask: *was that person actually interesting?*

The secure dater — and I mean secure as a skill, not a personality type, because this is learnable — goes in with a different agenda. They are curious. They are present. They are, crucially, willing to be disappointed. That willingness is everything. The moment you need the date to go well, you have lost the ability to assess it clearly.

Donna Barnes, who has coached dating for longer than most people have had smartphones, makes a point I find genuinely elegant: first dates should answer one question. Not *are they the one*, not *could I see a future with them*, not the elaborate extrapolation that takes two glasses of wine to complete. Just: do I want to see this person again? That is the only deliverable. Everything else is fantasy, and fantasy is the enemy of actual intimacy.

What creates the conditions for that clarity? Shorter dates. One drink. A walk. Coffee. Not dinner — dinner is a contract, a two-hour obligation that forces you to perform interest even when you stopped feeling it forty minutes in. The format should be reversible. Easy to leave if you need to. Easy to extend if you want to. Most people do the opposite: they plan elaborate evenings, because planning signals effort, and effort signals interest, and they are so worried about being wanted that they spend fifty euros on a situation they could have resolved over a flat white at Caffe Cordina in forty minutes.

Alcohol softens this further. It is not that drinks dates are wrong — God knows I have been on enough of them — but there is something clarifying about meeting someone sober, in daylight, without the social lubricant that makes everyone more charming and less legible. You see the nervous energy they cannot hide. The way they talk about their work. Whether they ask you anything at all. A man who does not ask you a single question on a first date is telling you everything you need to know about how he will love you. Take the information.

Then there is the question of where to go. Maltese first dates tend toward dinner at a restaurant, which is culturally generous and practically a disaster. Dim lighting and shared plates and three courses creates the illusion of intimacy before the reality of compatibility has even been established. I would argue for something that gives you something to talk about — an exhibition, a walk along the bastions at dusk, a market. The content gives you cover when the conversation stalls, and it reveals how someone moves through the world: are they curious, do they slow down to look at things, do they talk at you or with you?

The thing about first date advice is that most of