First date conversation can be awkward. What do you talk about? How can you come across well?
Well we’re here to help you.
1) Talk Travel, Not Movies
In a study by Richard Wiseman, less than 9% of couples that talked movies wanted a second date vs 18% of couples that talked about travel.
When talking about movies, less than 9 percent of the pairs wanted to meet up again, compared to 18 percent when participants spoke about the top topic—travel… the conversations about travel tended to revolve around great holidays and dream destinations, and that makes people feel good and so appear more attractive to one another.
2) It’s Not Just What You Talk About, It’s How You Talk
Add to what they say and bounce the ball back. This is how to have smooth first date conversation. Avoid extremes in autonomy. Don’t dominate, but don’t be a non-contributor either.
The trick is to avoid extremes in autonomy. Accept your date’s pass, redirect it slightly, and then return the ball— all with warmth and genuine interest in his or her responses. This acceptance and redirection is the push and pull that creates smoothness.
3) Share Secrets
Emotional, personal information exchange during first date conversation promotes powerful feelings of connection.
Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is interested in how people form romantic relationships, and he’s come up with an ingenious way of taking men and women who have never met before and making them feel close to one another. Given that he has just an hour or so to create the intimacy levels that typically take weeks, months, or years to form, he accelerated the getting-to-know-you process through a set of thirty-six questions crafted to take the participants rapidly from level one in McAdams’s system to level two.
But how effective can this be, really?
In under an hour it can create a connection stronger than a lifelong friendship.
What he found was striking. The intensity of the dialogue partners’ bond at the end of the forty-five-minute vulnerability interaction was rated as closer than the closest relationship in the lives of 30 percent of similar students. In other words, the instant connections were more powerful than many long-term, even lifelong relationships.
4) Choose Controversial Over Dull Every Time
If all else fails, talk about wars and STD’s.
Yeah, you heard me.
Forcing people to discuss interesting but more controversial topics made for more enjoyable first date conversation.
In a study by Dan Ariely:
We limited the type of discussions that online daters could engage in by eliminating their ability to ask anything that they wanted and giving them a preset list of questions and allowing them to ask only these questions. The questions we chose had nothing to do with the weather and how many brothers and sisters they have, and instead all the questions were interesting and personally revealing (ie., “how many romantic partners did you have?”, “When was your last breakup?”, “Do you have any STDs?”, “Have you ever broken someone’s heart?”, “How do you feel about wars?”)…
Instead of talking about the World Cup or their favorite desserts, they shared their innermost fears or told the story of losing their virginity. Everyone, both sender and replier, was happier with the interaction…What we learned from this little experiment is that when people are free to choose what type of discussions they want to have, they often gravitate toward an equilibrium that is easy to maintain but one that no one really enjoys or benefits from.
Need more tips? Have more tips to share? Leave them in the comment section below….
