Best First Date Topics to Avoid Awkward Silences

Fun, flirty prompts for when the appetizers arrive before your sense of self

John Singer Sargent, A Dinner Table at Night (1884). An awkward silence is observed in its natural habitat.

First dates are super hard! You sit down, order something normal so you don’t look totally insane, and then suddenly your mouth forgets every word it has ever learned to make.

Okay. Don’t panic. Here are some fun, easy conversation starters to keep things moving right along!

• Ask them about their favourite restaurant. People looove restaurants. Sometimes they have been to one.

• Ask them if they’re more of a coffee person or a tea person. This is light, cute, and gives you both something to say before the garlic sticks arrive—yum!

• Ask them about pets. Did they have a dog growing up? A cat? A bird with a vaguely military personality? Great work! Keep it easy breezy.

• Ask them what kind of movies they like, but don’t make it weird. Just say “movies”, not “the visual regime”.

• Ask them where they’d go if they could travel anywhere. This is a classic because everyone either has a beautifully specific answer or says “Italy.” Either way, you just bought yourself about 40 seconds.

• Ask them about their job, but in a fun way, like, “So what’s the vibe over there?” not “How do you participate in the reproduction of the social order?”

• Ask them what they were like as a kid. This is really sweet and usually harmless, unless they say “basically the same,” in which case congratulations, you are now dining with a metaphysical continuity problem.

• Ask them whether they think people actually change or whether we just construct an increasingly intricate labyrinth around the same basic wound.

• Ask them if they believe in “chemistry,” and if so, whether chemistry is something spiritual between two people or pheromones stimulating predetermined preferences that masquerade as free will.

• Ask them what their friends would say their “fatal flaw” is. Say it teasingly. Laugh a bit. Do not yet ask whether a flaw can be fatal if the self it kills was only ever a provisional arrangement of habits, memories, appetites, borrowed phrases, and unresolved childhood trauma.

• Ask them whether they feel more themselves alone or around other people, and then, if they hesitate, quickly course-correct that you didn’t mean it in a creepy way—not at all, ha ha!—you are only wondering whether the self is discovered in solitude or produced under observation like a shy but necessarily evasive particle.

• Ask them whether awkward silence is actually awkward, or whether it merely appears awkward because conversation has trained us to distrust any moment in which the machinery of mutual performance briefly stops grinding.

• Ask them what they’re “looking for.” This is normal dating language. Everyone understands it.

• Ask them whether they have ever felt truly understood. Then, before they answer, ask whether being understood would be comforting or invasive, because to be understood completely may be less like being loved and more like being entered without a warrant by a highly competent municipal official.

• Ask them whether the body is the self, or just the thing that perpetually interrupts every theory of the self by needing bread, warmth, sleep, espresso, and six ibuprofen per day.

• Ask them whether a successful date is one in which two people discover compatibility, or one in which neither person accidentally reveals the mechanism by which compatibility is invented, rehearsed, misremembered, and later described to friends as “actually kind of neat.”

• Ask them who should pay the bill.

• Ask them whether “should” has any meaning here.

• ∀x [Date(x) → ∃y (Silence(y) ∧ Awkward(y) ∧ y ∈ x)].

• 1. The world is everything that is the case.
  1.1 The date is also, unfortunately, the case.
  1.11 What cannot be spoken about must be texted later with too many emojis.

• Ask them whether the spark is real. Not real in, like, a symbolic or metaphorical way. Real real. Real in the way a chair is real, assuming chairs are real, and not merely a conspiracy of sensations stabilized by habit, language, lower-back need, and the collective cowardice of everyone who has ever sat down.

• Ask them whether dating is not, technically speaking, the opposite of love, since dating remains caught in the liberal-consumerist fantasy that one selects among available objects according to taste, lifestyle, perceived social value, dietary restrictions, and “chill factor,” while love begins only when this entire marketplace of reasons is interrupted by a contingent encounter which, retroactively, makes the reasons appear as though they had been waiting there all along; in other words, the lover does not say, “I have reviewed the available evidence and chosen you,” but rather, “Because you happened, the evidence has reorganized itself around you,” which is why every authentic romance contains something faintly Stalinist, though not through the crude abolition of freedom from the outside, but by commanding freedom from within, forcing the subject to act as though the accident were necessary,¹ though naturally you should say this while smiling and maybe offering them the remaining garlic stick.²

• Ask them if they had a nice time.

1. This is also why the worst sentence in contemporary dating is “I’m just seeing what’s out there,” since what is “out there” is precisely the ideological fantasy-screen preventing the Event from appearing as such.

2. If they ask whether this is Badiou or Lacan, marry them or flee immediately. This is, phenomenologically speaking, a distinction without a difference.

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