5 Rules For Defeating Dating Anxiety
Are you a confident dater? If so, that’s too bad because being a little nervous always brings more excitement - and it’s perfectly natural. Of course, if you find yourself hyperventilating into a paper bag and forgetting your own name then it’s time to pull it together. It’s time to stop worrying about being too-much-this or not-enough-that because truthfully, your date is just as nervous as you are. They just might be better at not letting it show.
Here are the 5 rules for defeating dating anxiety:
- Have an exit strategy. Especially on blind dates because, just like a box of chocolates … you never know what you’re going to get. Know the 5 Rules for getting out of a bad date.
- Stop. Now breath. Anxiety is like the tide. Once it starts coming, the waves keep rolling in, and once it starts to recede, it keeps going out. The difference is, you can’t stop the tide from coming in. If you’re running around before your date arrives and everything is going wrong then don’t keep doing that. Just stop. Breath. Let the tide go out. Relax or meditate for ten minutes and you’ll find the fresh perspective you need.
- The 2 second rule. If you’ve already met your date, then the hard part is already over. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book Blink, people get their first impressions of each other in as little as 2 seconds. You’ve already made your first impression. So if you’ve got a date, it was a good one. Be yourself and there isn’t too much that can go wrong. If you’re meeting this person for the first time … well, that’s what your exit strategy is for.
- Communicate. Tell your date that you’re a little nervous and they should expect you to act like a monkey-butt. A little truth and comedy goes a long way.
- Laugh later. Very few things in life are so important that you can’t laugh about them later. In fact, a lot of happy marriages started with a dating disaster. And no matter how sour a date goes, you always learn something about dating, about people, and about yourself. Plus, you have a story to tell and your friends will be there to support you and laugh with you at all of it.
