First impressions last

When you’re not the nervous one it’s easy to forget that the other person might be.

By TAMAR CASPI SHNALL
Dating cartoon 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Dating cartoon 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
My friend Judy recently told me about an awful first date she went on – except it was only the date that was bad, the guy was great! Judy, a divorced mother of two, met a man who is a divorced father on a Jewish dating website.
They’ve been dating now for about six weeks, but something that happened on their first date still bothers Judy: he touched her in an inappropriate way, in public, which made her feel very uncomfortable. She likes him and has continued to date him, he’s met her family and she thinks they’re a great match and could have a future together. But she can’t forget how embarrassed she was nor can she understand why he would do such a thing.
He hasn’t done anything weird since and she really wants to get over it but can’t. She wants to know how to move on so they can get more serious. The act obviously wasn’t bad enough for her to turn down his requests for second, third and fourth dates (and fifth and sixth), so why is she still harping on it? It’s time to put it to rest.
So how to get past a bad first impression? Unfortunately for her date, you can only make a first impression once. Fortunately for her date (and unbeknown to him – she hasn’t discussed the incident with him) she decided to try to overlook it.
My advice to Judy is to tell him, in a joking tone, that he should never repeat said act and let him know, in a teasing way, that he should realize how lucky he is that she gave him a second chance.
Allow him to respond and then drop the topic, forget about it and start making new memories to replace that one awful one. If she really wants something with this guy she needs to confront the situation head-on. Since she’s already continued to date him though, once she addresses the topic she then needs to forgive and forget otherwise she’ll be the one sabotaging the relationship.
Judy also needs to remember that people are often extremely nervous on first dates, want desperately to make a good impression and can therefore make complete fools of themselves instead. If Judy wants to make this work she has to chalk his behavior up to first-date jitters and excuse it. When you’re not the nervous one it’s easy to forget that the other person might be.
Ultimately you have to weigh your pros and cons when deciding if you’re going to continue seeing the other person – is the awkward act bad enough to stop seeing the guy? Aren’t people allowed to make mistakes? In Judy’s case, it wasn’t bad enough behavior to stop dating him, so what is Judy afraid of? Does she think he’s going to continue doing whatever it was he did, or possibly do something else that embarrasses her in public? Is she thinking that he has tried this on other first dates? Is she afraid that was his true self? Or is she just looking for some kind of fault in him so she can put up her guard and stop herself from possibly getting hurt? None of these questions can be answered without first talking to him about it and then next looking towards herself to see why she might be intentionally ruining a good thing.
When you find yourself in doubt as to whether to overlook a fault there are two things you can do. First, listen to your instincts, and second, try to look at your situation from a different perspective and see if it’s really as awful as it appears. It’s probably not, and hopefully Judy will see that. She obviously saw something in him because she’s kept dating him, but if she had not accepted his second date request I would have totally understood.
“S” and I had our own trials and tribulations almost right from the start that we both chose to overlook for various reasons. On one of our first dates we went to watch the World Cup finals on the beach in Tel Aviv with some of his friends. I thought it would be sweet of me to get to know his friends so I spent time asking questions and engaging them in conversation. “S” disagreed. He couldn’t understand why I would bother getting to know his friends when he and I were still getting to know each other. He thought I was flirting and I thought he was being insecure and jealous. We both had good points and although we didn’t see each other’s sides right away, we eventually conceded that we were both right and we were both wrong.
Then we moved on. And one of those friends I spent time talking to was the same guy who signed our ketuba (Jewish marriage contract).