stilted or your date looks differently than what you pictured him to be, see if you can learn an interesting aspect of your date's life, asking something you've always wanted to know about their job or hobby, or swapping stories about what each of you remembers doing and thinking on September 11, 2001.

Wait a minute… a few minutes ago you said that dating should be with the object of matrimony. Now you're making it sound as if the focus on the first date should be on having a good time and making light conversation. Isn't that somewhat of a contradiction? Wouldn't we be better off spending the first evening comparing our date to our wish list for a spouse?

The next thing I'm going to say may be the single most important piece of information you're going to get out of this. How many times have you let yourself think —

"Am I going to marry this person?"

Any chance you may have of developing a relationship will be killed as soon as you start thinking that you might end up marrying this complete stranger sitting across from you. You'll spend so much time imagining if you can live with his weird laugh or her strange hairstyle, that you'll never get to know your date. A matchmaker who attended one of our lectures, told us that this was some of the best advice she had ever heard. She was starting to date for the first time after her husband had died, and used our advice herself. Every time she found herself asking if this was the man for her, she pushed the thought right out of her head. She told us, "You know, I concentrated on enjoying the evening and I'd really have a good time."

If you find you have a few things in common and some aspect of your date's personality appeals to you, we suggest that you date that person again. Go out again even if you feel ambivalent. Even though most of us have been conditioned to expect that we will click instantly with the person who is right for us, in real life that doesn’t often happen. Instant connections are very rare, and for most people they take several meetings to develop. On the second date each of you will be more relaxed and will be able to learn even more about each other. As you get to know each other, a lot of couples who don't feel strongly positive or negative after their first date, discover that they genuinely like each other. The older you are, the more likely it is that this will happen. We can't begin to count how many of the couples we know were ambivalent about each other at first. But they went out a second time, often because a friend or a matchmaker pushed them into it. We know of one woman whose friends were so persuasive that she went out on a third and fourth date with a very nice guy she repeatedly insisted was not for her because he had children from his first marriage. By the fourth date she had