Sunday, June 06, 2010

One of my procrastination sites is Ask Metafilter. Today someone was asking another question about dating. I haven't had to date in a very long time, thank God, but it occurred to me that "show, don't tell" applies to online dating too.

A long time ago, I tried online dating. You'd email back and forth a bit, then meet up. The emailing back and forth tended to be about who you are and how you got that way. Then you'd meet in person and tell more of your life story over drinks. Soon you'd run out of life story. Awkward.

When you meet someone "in real life," you don't tell your story. You show who you are by what you do and how you do it. And if someone is interested in you, she finds out in bits and pieces about your backstory as you go along actually doing things. That's more like a good movie, which is 95% about what your hero is doing, and only 5% about how the hero got to be that way.

So my advice, if you are dating, is not to tell your story. Instead, go to the zoo. Talk about the animals. (Or go on a hike, or go to a used bookstore, or go to yard sales, or whatever.) Be fun. Show who you are, don't tell who you are. That will pull your audience of one into your story more than any amount of telling will.

9:28 AM

1 Comments:

and over-explaining is the mark of fraud.

By  odocoileus, at 12:33 PM  

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