Choosing where to go
For a first meeting with someone you met online, the best format is still the simplest: a coffee or a drink in a public, busy place, during the day or in the early evening, kept deliberately short (an hour is enough). This setting has three advantages: it lowers the pressure, it lets you leave without awkwardness if there is no spark, and it is safer.
A restaurant, often chosen out of habit, does the opposite: two hours face to face for two people who do not know each other — and the always delicate question of the bill. Save it for the second date. An activity (an exhibition, a market, a walk) is a good alternative: it gives you things to talk about and removes the constant face-to-face.
Safety basics
- Tell someone close to you where and when you are meeting, and who the person is.
- Get there by your own means, and leave the same way: do not get into the car of a stranger on a first date.
- Never leave your drink unattended.
- Keep your phone charged, and never hesitate to cut the date short if you feel uncomfortable. You owe no one an explanation.
If you met the person online, take the time to check them out before you meet. Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr, the French public cybercrime assistance service, recommends asking many questions and judging how consistent the answers are, running a reverse image search on their photos to see whether they are really theirs (the main search engines offer this), asking people close to you for their view at the slightest doubt, and never sending money to someone you have only communicated with online or by phone; it also advises being wary of anyone who promises to meet but always finds an excuse not to, especially when this has gone on for weeks (Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr). Such checks are nothing unusual: in the United States, 71% of people who have used a dating site or app say they have searched online for information about someone they were interested in (Pew Research Center, survey of October 2019). To spot and report romance scams, see our dedicated page.
Accounts to follow
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Nerves
First-date nerves are normal and, contrary to what people fear, rarely read as a flaw — more often as genuine interest. A few things help: arrive a little early to settle in, have a real time constraint (“I need to head off around seven”) that removes the pressure of the end of the evening, and remember that the other person is probably in the same state.
A simple idea against nerves: instead of trying to calm down, tell yourself you are excited. In several experiments (karaoke singing, public speaking, a maths test), researcher Alison Wood Brooks (Harvard Business School) found that people who reinterpreted their anxiety as excitement, for example by saying “I am excited” out loud, felt more excited and performed better than those who tried to calm down (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014). Those experiments were not about romantic dates: it is a method to try, not a promise.
What to talk about
One rule does most of the work: ask open questions and actually listen to the answers. People remember conversations where they felt heard. Three topics, by contrast, regularly sink a first date: the detailed history of past relationships, work or money troubles, and monologue about yourself without ever handing back the floor.
Follow-up questions, the ones that pick up what the other person has just said (“and how did you experience that?”), have measured effects. In three studies of real conversations, including speed dating, researchers at Harvard found that people who ask more questions, especially follow-up questions, are better liked by their conversation partners; in speed dating, those who followed up more often were more likely to get the other person’s agreement to a second date. According to the authors, the effect works through the feeling of being listened to and understood, and participants had not expected that asking questions would make them better liked (Huang et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017).
There is no need to prepare a performance: the aim of a first date is not to seduce at all costs, but to find out whether you want a second one.
Appearance and preparation
An outfit you feel comfortable in and that looks like you is better than a costume borrowed for the occasion. Take care of what is really noticed — cleanliness, breath, shoes — and forget the rest: most people remember neither the brand of your shirt nor the state of your skin, but the energy and attention you give off.
Afterwards
If you had a good time, simply say so within the next few hours: calculated waiting games lose far more opportunities than they create. If you did not, a short, honest message (“I had a nice time but did not feel a spark — all the best”) is infinitely more respectful than radio silence.
How long should you wait? A study from Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany), published online in September 2025 and in the February 2026 issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, compared three moments for receiving a message after a first date: right after parting, the next morning, or two days later. Among 543 participants responding to a fictional first-date scenario, the next-morning message produced the highest relationship intentions and the other two moments lower ones; women appeared more sensitive than men to this timing, a difference close to the limit of statistical significance (Teichmann et al., 2026). These are intentions reported in response to a fictional scenario, with no real date observed and no relationship followed over time: the next morning is a benchmark, not a rule.
Also avoid concluding too quickly that the evening went badly. In experiments with strangers who had just chatted, first-year students and workshop participants, people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partner had liked them; this gap, which the researchers call the “liking gap”, lasted for several months among students sharing a residence hall (Boothby et al., Psychological Science, 2018).
As for silence, few single people say they would choose it. In the United States, among singles looking for a relationship or dates, 8% say that if a first date had not appealed to them they would simply stop replying; 40% would tell the person themselves and 52% would not take the initiative but would say so frankly if the other person got in touch (Pew Research Center, survey of October 2019). “Ghosting” is nonetheless common: 29% of American adults say they have experienced it (Pew Research Center, 2020). Our page on ghosting comes back to it.
