After the first date and before starting the relationship, most misunderstandings revolve around time. Men and women have quite different concepts of when they should call or email after the first date. For example, they have a great time together, they say goodbye sweetly and they promise to call each other soon. For her, ‘soon’ means the same evening, when she is still on her way home. If he calls early in the morning, that’s fine too, but if he doesn’t call, she texts, or emails the day after the date, she’ll start to worry.
For him, ‘soon’ means ‘I’ll be busy these days, but maybe I’ll have time next week’, ‘when I finish my project’ or ‘after I get back from vacation’. For some men, soon can also mean ‘someday, when I feel like it’ or ‘never’.
The woman holds her cell phone in her hands all day and all night waiting for him to call. She doesn’t want to go to the party the next day because she’s afraid she won’t hear the phone ring. She checks her email every 5 minutes, and every hour that passes seems like a century.
Meanwhile, the man watches television with his cell phone turned off. At night, he goes out with his friends, and sometimes he remembers that he shouldn’t forget to call, but he decides every time that he doesn’t have time to do it. Eventually, after a week or so, he’ll have time to make that phone call.
She’ll be an ice queen by then, because she thinks it’s been too long since the date. She’ll probably say that she’s too busy to see each other again and that this is the end of a relationship that she never really started. If she promised to call first, it will ring a couple of hours after she ends the date: the guy will take this as a sign of passionate love, even if the girl just wanted to say that he had a good time and he would like to see her. him again.
Men and women have very different notions about the meaning of the word ‘soon’. If a guy says that he will call soon, the girl should try to define what ‘soon’ means: a day, a week or a month? If she doesn’t want to appear too anxious, she should ask something like this: ‘I’ll be busy for two days. Can you call me after that? If he says ‘yes’, she can expect the phone to ring after two or three days.
To avoid misunderstandings, guys should be more precise when they say “soon” and should try to call a little earlier than normal. This can bring a lot of extra points for them, and there’s no danger that their date will eventually dump them. The girls, on the other hand, must wait twice as long as they normally would without any hard feelings.
The best way to avoid the call/no call scenario is to schedule a second appointment before the end of the first. You need to set the date no earlier than one week and no later than two weeks. There is no gender rule about setting up a second date, so he or she can bring it up.