If you have ever had a horrible first date….or second and third date….here are some tips on how to behave if you run into the dreaded dater once again in “Dating: For less than memorable dates, next meetings are tricky“—plus, I’m quoted in the article–yay!
That guy over there — the one perusing the produce at Safeway — looks familiar. A friend of a friend? An old classmate? Wait: Have we been on a date? ”
With Washington’s interconnected social and professional circles, running into someone you’ve dated can be more than a bit awkward. Especially when one, or both, of you don’t remember each other.
Dating expert Evan Marc Katz, 37, says such re-meetings are common among urban daters. “When you’re talking about 100 dates over five years, it’s sort of not surprising.” If you’re dating frequently and you didn’t go on more than one date — and nothing memorable happened — dates can tend to blend in, Katz says.
In fact, Katz’s best friend found himself in such a situation. It took those daters about 30 minutes into their second date — years removed — to realize that they’d been out before.
Katz likens such a meeting to running into someone familiar at a party and trying to figure out how you know each other.
“You just gotta try to get a good laugh out of it; what else can you do?” he says.
Andrea Latta, 26, had gone out for drinks with a guy; they’d had a good time and texted occasionally, but their travel schedules kept them from a follow-up date. One night, about three months after their first date, she got a text from him, inviting her to join him at a bar in Arlington.
But when she showed up and said hello, he didn’t seem to recognize her — or their plans to meet up.
“He said ‘hi’ as if you’d say to someone squeezing in at the bar and then turned away,” Latta says. “I don’t know if he thought I was someone else, if he had mixed me up with some other girl in his phone.”
Latta decided not to “out” him, a move that D.C. style consultant Celena Gill says is smart. The best way to handle such a situation, she says, is to give the other person a subtle opening.
Simply say: “Haven’t we met before?” With enough conversation, the other person might figure it out. But if not, don’t dwell: Keep the conversation moving, she advises.
“If you had a bad experience, you don’t want them to ask you out again,” Gill cautions. “Skip it, leave it in the past.”
Which is exactly what Lani Rosenstock Inlander did when a familiar face didn’t remember her.
Rosenstock Inlander, a style consultant devoted to making others appear memorable, showed up for a photo shoot in Brooklyn and almost immediately was prepared for an awkward run-in. A guy she had dated for just a month, about five years earlier, had lived in the building where the shoot was taking place.
She went back for several shoots, and one day walked smack into Tim — and his wife.
“I said: ‘Hi, how are you?’ And he just thinks I’m someone walking in the door, saying ‘hi.’ . . . It was a complete blank, like he had never seen me in his entire life,” she says.
“If I kiss someone good night — even if it was just once and not a big deal — I’m not going to forget what they look like.”
Sam Yagan, chief executive for the online dating site OkCupid, says online daters often run into each other in person after only having “met” online.
“People don’t realize at the time what’s happening,” Yagan says. “It’s only when one person is back in front of their computer” that he realizes that cute girl from Starbucks looks familiar because of her online profile.
While the ability to recognize faces varies by person, attraction might play a role: Research shows that oxytocin (sometimes called the “love hormone”) improves social memory, and it can be released in processes related to attraction, such as sympathy, empathy and social touch, says Abigail Marsh, an assistant psychology professor at Georgetown University. However, “any strong emotion improves memory,” Marsh says. “Negative emotions, if anything, create even stronger memory.”
Check out the original article here. Keep it strictly fab!
