First Date Goals, Motives and Expectations
People on first dates are usually relatively aware of their expectations regarding the outcome of the date. “Evaluation of a date may depend, in part, on the extent to which persons reach their goals.” Goals are fluid, meaning said goals may change over the course of a date. For example, a person may go into a date with the aim of establishing a friendship but at some time during the date decide to pursue a romantic relationship. Goals depend on the individual, but for the most part, goals on the first date, are fairly similar between parties. In her study on first dates, Mary Claire Morr explains that expectations for a date can be formed based on information about the communicator, relationship and context.
Communicator characteristics include all of the features of the individual, such as personality, physical appearance, and communication style. These characteristics can lead the partner to predict how the other will communicate in a “dating” situation. The relationship factor involves characteristics that describe the relationship between the two individuals. These factors include the degree of familiarity, liking, attraction, or similarity. The context feature involves aspects like the environment and the situations the individuals are in such as privacy, formality, and task oriented. These situations either enhance or diminish the interaction on the date and help maintain and structure individual’s goals.
Read more about this topic: First Date (meeting)
Famous quotes containing the words date, motives and/or expectations:
“Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“The term preschooler signals another change in our expectations of children. While toddler refers to physical development, preschooler refers to a social and intellectual activity: going to school. That shift in emphasis is tremendously important, for it is at this age that we think of children as social creatures who can begin to solve problems.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)