Hi Davide. Nice to hear from you. Glad you are through the worst of your depression and are finding joy in your activities again. RE: dating. I, too, had a lot of first dates. Most of them I already had a feeling we would not be a match before we went out but I persevered because I didn’t necessarily trust my gut feeling. If you want to minimize the chances you are going to go on a date with a dud, I would encourage you to have some phone conversations with someone first rather than limit it to text. I met my bf a month after we started talking (we live a distance apart). He stood out to me from the get go because ten minutes into our online conversation, he asked me if he could call me on WhatsApp so we could talk. This was really unusual... most guys I had met seemed content to text. Texting doesn’t necessarily reveal whether or not there would be a spark. I found that people often present differently via text than they do in person. They have time to craft text responses and, honestly, you also don’t know if you are texting with that person or with them and someone else who happens to be in the room at the time. Telephone calls are much closer to what it would be like with that person IRL. You can tell a lot more about a person when you hear their voice and their responses to you are in real time. I knew after ten minutes of talking to my bf that we had something. We talked for over an hour non-stop and it was effortless... and it wasn’t just me asking questions and him answering. The effort to get to know each other was on both sides. Anyway...by the time we met in person, we both knew that unless one of us completely misrepresented ourselves physically(old pictures, etc...), we would hit it off. We did and we have been seeing each other exclusively for the last six weeks. Early days but so far so good. Anyway...when you decide to get back on the horse, so to speak, try to have phone calls with people. I think that will help you to weed people out before you invest time and expense into multiple first dates. Good luck!!
