| How do I ask someone out? A few things to know before asking: Click here to return to the List of Topics page.
Do you have his/her parent's support? Later in life, after graduating, there's an extremely important question to ask a prospective date, and that is: "Is there anyone who would be upset if they knew you were dating me?" Or, humorously; "I'm a certified good catch with a clean abstract and a vasectomy; debt free, hobbies, coaching and gardening." (The implied communication being, "You too?"). Aside from making sure the person is cleanly separated/divorced it lets you know if there might be someone hexing the success of your new relationship. Goodness knows you don't want the karma of stealing another's partner when they were only in the middle of an argument. It doesn't work to support another in deceiving their partner, or in your case, their parent. To do so sets it up for someone to deceive you or steal what's important from you. Worse yet, you definitely don't want the hexing power (it's called communicating from intention) of another's mother who wants their child to date, say, only Protestants who are college-bound. Such a date prospect has too much baggage, too many unresolved issues with their family to be dating. In truth they need counseling/therapy. If you date such a person you also need counseling. I mention this important date-asking question because you always always need to know if have the support of your date's parents. The time to live from integrity is now. If you support your date in sneaking out without his/her parents meeting you, without their support, then you are karmically setting up life for a very messy (usually expensive and grievous) learning experience. To choose to be sneaky is in fact putting your growth on hold, perhaps for 10-30 years. If your date replies, "Oh, my parents don't care" it's a therapy warning sign. A mother whose daughter is deceiving them deceived her own parents. The mother is still hiding the biggie from their mother. They put learning about the consequences of deceit on hold, consequently they can't teach their daughter from experience. Hypocritical preaching to be open and honest doesn't get gotten.
Where are you going for your date? The ideal first date is to do something that's free. A walk in the park, zoo, or a museum. Find something to do that won't require that either of you have to spend money. In that way, if they decline your invitation, you'll be pretty sure is wasn't about money. If you ask them to a school event remember that concessionaires come around hawking drinks, etc. Plan on declining unless your date offers to buy. In this way you won't embarrass them. If they offer to buy yours, you'll know they have enough to buy their own, decline and say, "Thanks, I'd feel more comfortable if I got my own." If you haven't spent much time with them before it's best to make a date that only lasts a few hours rather than a whole day. Several hours can be agonizing if you find yourself with someone who is as uncomfortable at talking as you might be. [ top ] Who pays for what? Your attitude about money before you begin dating is important. Your beliefs determine whether you'll attract a successful person or one who needs to crash and burn before they have life work (someone who has accumulated a life-time of unacknowledged perpetrations), someone programmed for dependency, a con to match your need to be a victim. Your task now is to find out how you have been programmed. If you have been programmed to use and be used you have a choice now to undo the damage. If you have been unconsciously programmed by your parents to be addicted to using and to being used then you are also addicted to arguing and you will say that there's nothing wrong with paying for a first date. You will pay for your arrogance later after your divorce. You'll feel as though you lost, as though you have been used. Why is your attitude about money important? Your parents and grandparents are still recovering from some 19th century Victorian attitudes and customs. A few decades ago boys were supposed to ask and girls were supposed to sit and wait to be asked. Boys were supposed to learn how to make money and girls were supposed to learn how to take care of homes and be mothers. This philosophy has had disastrous effects. It supported men and women in using each other. It supported men in using women as servants * (the commitment to service, to serving, keeping the household running, frees the man to make money). Because most men have little or no sense of the value of their mother's service throughout childhood (cleaning, cooking, laundry) they balk at being fair about who gets what when arguing over property and money during a divorce. In fact this attitude causes the divorce.This Victorian philosophy supported women in using men to survive so they wouldn't have to study towards careers while attending high school. Women had the option of opting for the seemingly easier Mrs. degree, whereas men knew that no one would take care of them financially. This eventually created resentment and an inaccurate sense of value and deservedness (entitlement) when it came time for divorce settlements. Your arguments during your divorce are all determined by your attitudes now about money, which are determined by the attitudes of your parents. If your observation is that their relationship with money works you'll adopt theirs. I say "observation" because observations are not always accurate. If you don't admire the results your parents have been producing you'll make them wrong and try to not be like them. and
Decide up front (before
even asking someone out or before accepting a date invitation) whether you want to go Dutch-treat (each
pay their own way) or not, on a date. Quite often boys will offer to "treat" a girl because they have a job and the girl, for whatever reason, doesn't have any spending money. This is not the ideal way to have a first date. Why they don't have a job is extremely important. It could be said that if you truly care for a girl then support her in getting a part-time job so that she can pay her own way. That she doesn't yet have a job could mean that she isn't ready for the economics of dating. It's quite possible that her value system is to use her allowance to buy clothes to attract a boy whom she will con into paying her way rather than pay her own way on a date—a sure formula for relationship failure. Quite often a boy who pays for the girl's movie has no business dating yet. He is too unconscious. He has yet to have certain conversations with his parents, conversations that all teens are supposed to have, so as to ensure dating success. A boy who cons a girl into going out on a first date, who pays the girl's way on the first date, often ends up with a girl who, if she had to spend her own hard earned money on a Dutch-treat date, would not chose the boy who offers to pay her way. A girl who is being invited by a boy who, for a first date, offers to pay for a concert, needs to say up front, "I'd love to but, you have to let me pay for my share." And then, when the boy does his macho 'Me Tarzan' act and says, "Nah, that's ok." The girl must say, "I insist. I don't want to be obliging to you. Do we have a deal?" Remember: The chances of a first date, with a boy who buys his dates, turning into a successful relationship are remote. Now is the time to support women earning as much as men in the work place.
There's a certain sexy confidence about a boy who's sure of himself to the degree that he waits to see who chooses him. Few "boys" are patient enough to wait to be chosen, yet it's what girls have been doing for centuries. The high divorce rate doesn't speak well for this tactic anymore. Put another way, given the present divorce rate of approximately 50%, boys haven't been doing a very good job of choosing, of aggressing. The benefits of waiting to be chosen is that you know the girl really likes you enough to get up the courage to ask. When a woman decides what she wants she has the power, the intention, to make it work. When a man tries to con a woman into doing what he wants he is at effect of whether or not the woman wants it to work. A woman may accept a date invitation but to be right, that she was right to not invite him first, unconsciously thwarts the success of the relationship. Often a lonely woman will accept an invitation rather than stay home alone; seldom do they call the man for a second date. The reason it's important to have made this "Dutch-treat" decision up front, even before the invitation, is that the certainty will support your confidence and success. Even a boy who is sure he will pay just to have a date, will come across as confident. However, he could be communicating non-verbally, during the invitation, "I'm so pathetically lonely. I know you have not found me attractive enough to work and save your money and come up and ask me out, so I'm resorting to buying a date. I'm afraid to insist upon Dutch-treat right now because I believe you don't find me attractive enough to spend your money with me."
Should girls ask boys out or what? Girls: If you wait to be asked you only get to choose from about 10% of the boys, those who aren't confident enough to wait until you give them a communication (a signal, usually a conscious smile) that indicates that you are interested. Quite often a boy will wait to see how you handle another boy who walks across the gym floor to ask you for a dance. On the other hand, if you do the choosing then most dances will be with those you want to dance with.
Boys: It's suicidal to ask a girl out if you think there's a remote possibility she may say no; the rejection can damage your self-confidence, even your attitude about women, for life. If you don't have some sense of certainty don't ask. There's nothing more invalidating than to get up your courage to walk all the way across the dance floor and the girl says, "No." To have asked someone who said no indicates that you were, and probably still are unconscious. All girls communicate non-verbally whether or not they are interested in you. Dear Gabby: Waiting for guys to ask me out / positionality broadcasting signals.
Fear triggers the question, "How do I ask someone out?" If you are asking this question you have fear in your relationship with others, specifically, the opposite sex. It's normal; the fear is supposed to be there. The fear is there to give you practice learning how to communicate from your experience as opposed to communicating from your mind. Put another way, the fear is there to support you in telling the truth; more accurately it's there to give you the experience that telling the truth works. What does it mean to "communicate from your experience?" When you even think about approaching someone to ask them out for the first time, you begin to experience fear. The closer you get, say 5 feet from them, as you approach them to ask them out, the fear begins manifesting itself physically; perhaps sweaty palms or blushing. Weak knees is common. As you get within talking distance your mind is mush. You have two choices. Two choices: 1) To tell the truth, to share what you are experiencing (it's called communicating from your experience) or, 2) To let your mind take over and try to deliver something clever, something you read or heard or some planned speech you practiced in your mind. It's called communicating from your mind. Here's what the two different choices sound like:
Choice 1 makes you real, it creates space for compassion. Choice 2 might work but you deceived them, they didn't get the real you. Underneath the "Hi hot stuff," or whatever opening you would use to hide your fear, to talk above your fear, to act confident, is the real nervous you. Now you've got to maintain your, I'm cool, I'm not nervous, act. So they end up relating with your act instead of you. Your act causes (yes causes) them to put on their act with you. The advantage of communicating from your experience is that you open the door for the person to ask you what the fear is about. In fact, quite often they will reply, "What are you afraid of?" And there's the money question. I say money because if you answer it truthfully, you'll save yourself a few thousand in therapy fees later in life. Because that's the very same question you'll later pay a therapist to ask, only they'll ask you 20-years later when the memory of your first date is layered underneath thousands of other experiences of fear. When you tell the truth the fear disappears. On the other hand, if you do your cool act, if you communicate from your mind, you don't get to talk about your fear. You could end up having fear in most of your relationship with most others for life. The vast majority of adults have fear in their relationships with others and they don't know it except by the results; what's missing is the spontaneity that comes from communicating from one's experience. Word of caution: Let's say you read the above and are willing to communicate from your experience. So you plan to do it. You walk up to your prospective date and you say, "Hi, I'm uncomfortable, would you like to go out with me...?" But, the truth is you were not uncomfortable. You were in fact experiencing excitement. What would happen is the person would experience confusion, in part because they would sense that your opening statement was false. You'd come across as a phony. In other words, you have to look and see just what you are experiencing at the moment and share that. You can't go up with a plan about what words to use. You see it's possible that you have acknowledged your fear to yourself, through reading this, and say, talked about it or even shared (cleared it) through The Clearing Process, and therefore you have disappeared most of, or all of, your fear. It's even possible that you have grown up in a household in which there is open and honest communication, or you have brothers and sisters, and so you have already disappeared your fear of the opposite sex.
[ top ] The answer to the question, how to ask someone out? There is no right way. However, the
following usually works. Put
one foot in front of
the other and walk up to them. Don't forget to stop a few feet from them
(this is important)
Last edited 3/26/18 [ top ] Click here to return to the list of Dating Topics. |
. Then
say, "Hi." And take what you get. If they reply with a warm smile then
you're on a roll. Your intuition about them was
right-on. If they give you the cold shoulder, get away fast. They are
stuck in an abusive communication model. They haven't been shunned enough
in life to appreciate the courage it took for you to make the first move.
In short they are lacking compassion. If you press through their rudeness
just to have a date you'll have an indication that you may be addicted to being abused. A
healthy well adjusted teen, not having any need for abuse, does not
attract or hang around abuse.