Ask A Guy: Demystifying Post-First Date Communication

Advice from a real guy on real dating problems…

Welcome to Ask A Guy, where you can find unfiltered, honest, feedback on how guys (well at least one: me) really think about things, from relationships to body types to life dilemmas. Here’s this week’s:

Question: I went on a great date with a guy. It’s been three days and still nothing? Should I text him, move on, or what?

Ah, young love (I’m assuming you’re young – just go with it). You met a guy through friends or maybe online and you’ve broken bread or maybe even watched Katy Perry lip-sync into a microphone for three hours. He felt similarly but hasn’t followed-up yet. What’s a girl to do?

I can tell you that it’s 2015, that gender roles and expectations have become increasingly blurred, and that the rules of courtship have modernised for the better. So text away. Who reaches out to whom in what time period doesn’t matter – only that you two like each other. If you had a great first date and haven’t heard anything, maybe he’s just tied up and would love to hear from you. Maybe you should even take the initiative and plan the next one and he’ll love your assertiveness. Yes, I can tell you all that because it’s how things should be. But unfortunately, I’d be lying.

Real talk: if you go on a date and text a guy first afterwards, he will probably be less interested. I say probably because there are differences – I personally think it’s awesome but many guys do not and have told me as much. Whatever the actual reality is, for most of us if the girl calls or texts before we do she’ll appear desperate. Girls are worried about guys being creepy; guys are worried about girls being clingy and crazy. C words are “no” in a relationship. You want to avoid being labeled as one early on.

So I would wait. Not check-your-phone-every-minute wait, but do something else and don’t think about him wait. He’ll come around and if he doesn’t, oh well you’ll run into him somewhere soon and he can redeem himself or you can slap him, which is a cool benefit to being a girl. If you like really really really really really like him, then you are allowed to invite him to something where you’ve invited a bunch of people. But I’d still wait a minimum of four days. Then you can send the Facebook/Whatsapp invite that’s not addressed to him but to a group of people. And don’t do what a girl in my college did where she pretended there was a huge party but only invited the guy and when he showed up expecting a shindig, it was just her and NO BALLOONS. That’s both creepy and sad.

On the other side, you can just say f-it and decide “I’ll send whatever I want, whenever I want”. Hey, if that’s what you want, you go girl and that’s fine – you’re just doing the texting equivalent of sex on the first date. If you really like each other it’ll work out just fine. And if you’re not interested in a guy who says things like “a woman should be” (or more likely these days, thinks it but doesn’t say it) this will weed those guys out. Or you can just accept that current reality means unequal standards (by the way, if you get free drinks from guys all the time you are accepting unequal standards) at the onset, but once you’re together you can define your idea of relationship equality and work to change the system from within.

Personally, I don’t care what the guy or girl does in a relationship or who contacts whom; only that you both are on the same level emotionally. And if you can get there you won’t worry about texting each other, you’ll be using those fingers to hold hands.