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Read other letters about this article
I have not had the time to read through too many of the other letters, but I thought Cary's advice was pretty good.
When I read the initial letter, the first thing that came to my mind was that, based on my limited knowledge as a father of teenaged sons, and some knowledge of kids in college these days, that often young people that I know about do not dating as much of a model for a lead up to romance, and I do not think that romantic relationships have excatly died out among our youth. Thus, dating is certainly not the only way of going about finding romance, or even the favored or typical way of doing so among some very large groups.
This is not to say that what appears to me to be the current younger persons' model of finding romance necessarily would work well for older persons out of school and working. Even the most social of us is unlikely to be spending large amounts of time hanging out with large groups of friends with ever shifting memberships, which facilitates getting to know potential romantic interests while also bringing sufficient new people around so as to create ongoing romantic possibilities.
I think Cary's suggestion is good, and certainly doing group type activies around common interests seems to be a way to both provide an opportunity to get to know individuals, while having new people coming in from time to time. I think that adults are probably going to want to split off for some one-on-one time earlier on than teenagers are, but that is more a function of adults less investment in what their peer group thinks and does, than something specific to relationships. It seemed to me that the writer was more talking about kind of date where the participants know very little about each other prior to the date, rather than the kind of third or fourth date situation where the other person is starting to become known. No doubt that first dates/blind dates can be mighty awkward.
This dating advice thing is dangerous ground. Who really knows who will be attracted to who and for what reasons. I think "the just be yourself" adivce has a lot of validity, but is more a way of cutting through any nervousness and a way of recognizing that a "failed" date is not any reflection on either individual. The advice is really to relax and just behave as one normally would. But if one is constantly measuring internally whether they are "being themselves," they probably are not being themselves, or themselves is perhaps overly self-aware.
I would think that another useful way of going into a date is to focus in terms of taking an interest in the other person. The purpose of a date is should not be to confirm or deny your own value. There lies insanity. The purpose of the date for any individual seems to me more to find out about the other individual. And, nicely for this purpose, nothing is quite so appealing to anyone as some else that is taking a genuine interest in you.
