To-Don't: Talk & Text

I don't understand why some people think that it's perfectly acceptable to ignore your date so you can talk or text on your cellphone. I mean, yes, sometimes, during a date, your phone goes off, and sometimes it is indeed an emergency that you need to take care of. In case it's not an emergency, you need to either hang up the phone, or call off the date.

I admit, there have been times when I'm out with a girl and my phone goes off. Every time this happens, the girl goes silent, and indicates that she's expecting me to answer my phone. Since I wasn't raised in a barn, I understand that the proper etiquette is to either turn my phone off, or put it on silent. Most of the time, she will silently praise you, and you manage to rack up a lot of points with her through something so simple and polite. There are, of course, the other times, where she will be so taken aback that she'll ask something akin to, "...aren't you going to answer that?" Your response should not be to turn the phone back on and check the message; instead, you should just shake your head, and say respond with "of course not, today/tonight's about us." That will usually earn you even more points than the silently praising girl, but it does depend on your tone when you say it. If you say it in kind of an angry or irritated voice, she's going to think that you're blaming her for not being able to answer your calls. If you say it a robotic monotone, she's likely to think that you're trying to cut off all contact with the outside world so you can drag her into the woods and chop up her body. So try to be conversational in your manner, or you're going to scare her off.

I know that there's a dating technique within the female community wherein your best friend will call you partway through the date with devastating news to give you a way out if you're looking for one. While this has never happened to me, I have to say that it's greatly insulting to everyone's intelligence. If you're not willing to give your date the chance to get through the entire event, then you should also have the nerve to just straight up tell them that you're not that into it. Yes, it's going to be an uncomfortable moment, but, if you're that desperate to get out of your situation, then I'm guessing that the entire date has been an uncomfortable moment, so just bite the bullet.

There is only one time, outside of an emergency, wherein it's acceptable to make a phone call during your date, and that's if you excuse yourself to the washroom. This really applies more to women than to men, as I don't think it would ever be acceptable for me to make a phone call during a date, but the ladies still need to make sure that they keep the call short and don't leave their man waiting on them too long. As for texting, and this applies to both genders, you're fine to do so if your date has excused him/herself from the table for a moment or two. If your date returns while you're in mid-text, just brush it off as a friend asking how the date's going, which will elicit the same question from your date. The proper response is to say yes, it is going well. If the date isn't going so smoothly, then you should probably say you were texting about something else.

Just remember: when you're on a date with someone, you should be on a date with someone. Picking up your phone is, essentially, inviting an obnoxious stranger into a nervous, and possibly uncomfortable, evening.