Saturday, December 12, 2009

Ooh late! First (Offline) Contact (Part 1)

First (Offline) Contact

So you’ve been messaging someone for a bit and you’ve gone to the next stage. The stage where they trust you enough to give you their phone number. And you call the person up. This is an incredibly scary moment b/c it’s the time you come out from the anonymity of the internet and transition into IRL.

My first suggestion is to reread everything one more time: profile, messages, etc. You don’t want to ask them where they went to college if they never went, b/c that’s really awkward. With that information, you can ask them about things, if you read they majored in English, don’t ask them to confirm it, ask them what classes they took, if there were any books that they studied that they really liked.

Find out from the other person when is a good time to contact them. If you’ve been emailing back and forth for a bit and get a phone number in your latest email, don’t get crazy excited when checking your email at midnight and call them up immediately. Because yeah you’re so happy that you’ve gotten to the next step, but calling them in the middle of the night is bad form, and makes you seem really desperate. So I’d find out when is a good time. My other tip is even if you make the call at a semi reasonable hour like 9, if you think you might want to chat for a while, call earlier. I once was called at 11 at night. Sure I’m awake now but for how much longer? So make sure you think about the other person’s schedule and they’ll be a lot happier with you in the long run.

On the flip side, if they give you a phone number and you’re genuinely interested in the other person, don’t wait three days. I don’t know who came up with that idea but it’s dumb. I’d say call the next day if it’s convenient. This is not based on any scientific study but my personal opinions about being honest and not making them guess about your intentions. If you don’t want girls to play mind games with you, why would you play games with her? So if you say you’re going to call Saturday, call her Saturday. Flaking in this situation is one of the worst things possible b/c you’ve essentially lied. Think of it this way, if you made a movie date for Saturday and she didn’t show up, that’d be really horrible right? Well if you say you’re going to call Saturday and don’t, there better be a dead grandmother or something like that involved or you can start saying goodbye to any interest that she had.

Continued tomorrow!

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