I was already loving Paloma Faith’s reinvention as the Germaine Greer of pop when shared her latest insight into modern womanhood; revealing on Sophie and Jamie Laing’s NewlyWeds podcast that she only allocates half-an-hour for first dates.
“Thirty minutes is like an interview,” she explained, as if she were the Alan Sugar of love, although she did not reveal whether the dates who didn’t pass her test were dismissed with “You’re fired”.
Actually, I find Faith’s all-business approach to dating rather refreshing. As someone who has had more dates than job interviews – I’m not sure if that is a ratio to be proud of – I have wasted too much of my life on dull dates. Hanging in there for hours, humouring men who I knew from the start that it wouldn’t work with.
Of course, this is partly because I am a woman, and we are trained not to cause a fuss. Hence, I once went for dinner with a man whose personal passion was typefaces and spent several hours wondering how to escape, while he explained the complexity of kerning (if you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t need to).
Also, it is because I am English and so burdened with a sense of politeness. I’ve had whole relationships with people I’ve been too polite to dump. One friend claims he ended up getting married out of a British sense of not wanting to upset anyone.
Paloma Faith is right, half-an-hour is more than enough to know whether you find someone interesting. It takes even less time to decide if you fancy someone. The science says it takes us seconds to make up our minds if we’re attracted to someone. With online dating, if the chat has been good, you can usually tell from the minute they walk in if you’re prepared to take the next step and snog them.
Since turning 40, I have tried to become more ruthless about how I use my time. Now I would never commit to a meal on the first date. Even when I meet someone for a drink I set myself up with an out in advance so that I can escape – like pretending my dog looked peaky when I left. It seems better to decide that you like someone so much that you’re going to stay, rather than find yourself stuck with them for the night. Or even, in the case of some extremely awkward one-night-stands, have them still hanging around the next day.
Faith’s approach is surely much kinder – be honest from the start and tell them your 30-minute rule. At least then, if things aren’t working you have “a hard out”. I suspect if you told any date straight-forwardly, they’d agree.
After all, short dates have their merits. They take the pressure off. And they seem do-able when life is so busy that being single on the apps can sometimes feel like a full-time job. If love is just a numbers game, you might as well try and pack in as many potential partners as possible.
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Read MoreBut perhaps the best thing about short dates is that they leave you both with the potential for wanting more, which is so rare now in our instant-gratification culture where everything is so readily available.
Enforcing an artificial deadline on which you have to whirl off into the night, like some kind of millennial Cinderella, opens up the potential for craving – and the thrilling anticipation of a second-date. Which is a far more exciting a prospect than calling your friends drunk in the morning filled with regret.
Talking of which, an added bonus of the half-hour date, is that it leaves no potential for beer-goggles or a drunken snog taking place.
Intriguingly, after I heard Faith’s 30-minute-date rule I remembered that she once wrote a song called “30 Minute Love Affair” about a real-life brief encounter that she says she had with a busker in London’s Leicester Square when she was 14. “I asked him if he’d be there the next day and he said he would. When I went back he was gone, and I’ve never forgotten it,” she said of the story behind the song. I wonder if that influenced her new rule for dates?
The track is a paean to both instant attraction and also the joy of a fleeting affair, “Sometimes it’s better just to let them go” Faith sings, “Cause your illusion’s more than what you could know”.
Of course she is right. Perhaps half an hour isn’t long enough to get to know everything about someone but it is short enough to make sure every date is a good night.
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