Legitimate Dating

Legitimacy is a concern in the dating world. Are you the person you claim to be in your online profile? Will your pictures do you justice? In that vein, being the girl going on fifty first dates comes with its own legitimate quandary.

There’s a statement I’m confronted with quite a bit these days. Well, it’s technically a question, but it’s always posed as a statement by the querier, as though the possibility of my conjuring up an answer is as inconceivable to them as an emerald sunset: Why go on a first date if there isn’t going to be a second one? These aren’t even real dates.

The glib response is obvious: Why not? (A question to which there are several un-glib answers.) The sincere response is that every first date has the potential not to have a follow-up date, whether it’s with a local or somebody from out of town. And conversely, every first date has the potential to become a long-term relationship.

Of course, there’s an argument to be made here. That the only way to truly know if a person is worth additional dates is by going out with them repeatedly, becoming comfortable and intimate with them, and then making a decision. While fifty/fifty is good at opening doors, the doors that it opens within me and my dates only let us see a small portion – the entryway -into our real selves.

So are the dates legitimate? To me, yes – of course.

And real? Again, of course. 

Though this line of questioning does bring into play another line of thought: what is dating? What makes a date real or not real? What constitutes a successful date?

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