There are plenty of times when you go out to a movie with a friend and never second-guess the just-friends status of the evening. Then there are those candlelit dinners with a certain someone that you would never doubt as being a date.
But for every obvious date or non-date situation, there are also a handful of those confusing in-between circumstances or those semi-awkward social interactions that I like to call "pseudodates."
You know what I'm talking about — those situations where you go out with someone and it feels kind of date-ish, but you're not sure if they're interested in more than just hanging out. Some of those classic date determinants are probably missing — there was no official "asking out," you split the tab and/or both of you shied away from a goodnight kiss.
When I first started out writing this week's column, I decided to try figuring out how most people would define a date. I attempted to conduct a little research (i.e. bringing up the subject at every social gathering I went to over the past week), but the results seemed pretty inconclusive. It appeared everyone had a story to tell about "that one time when," yet no one had any idea how to qualify what makes a date and what doesn't.
I'll be honest: In trying to define date-status, I was secretly hoping to solve a few pseudodate mysteries of my own, and one in particular has always stuck out in my mind. In last week's column, I suggested a classical music concert as a potential date idea. I still think an orchestra concert can make a pretty awesome date, but when I went to Symphony Hall last semester with a guy I knew from class, I was never sure if it was actually a date or not.
On one hand, we went off-campus, dressed up for the evening and were surrounded by other couples all during the show — pretty date-like circumstances. We were friends but had never hung out one-on-one before, yet I was open to seeing where things could go.
However, we just agreed to go to the concert together after joking around about our music classes; each of us bought our own tickets and shared only an awkward goodbye after we stepped off the Joey.
Were we just two friends out sharing a common interest, or was it a date?
"You should always expect that it can be interpreted as a date," a guy friend offered as advice this week. Basically, my friend argued, if it hadn't been ruled as a "just friends" thing and if you can reasonably assume that it could be a date, the other person is probably also aware of that.
So what about that concert date — did that guy from class consider that it could be a date, too? In the interest of getting to the bottom of the pseudodate mystery (and let's be honest, to satisfy my own curiosity), I finally just asked him about it this weekend.
For the record, he laughed when I asked and said in retrospect that while it seemed like a friend-thing at first, the evening just "felt like a date" by the end. Mystery solved (sort of), and my friend's theory was right: If you're wondering about the situation, chances are the other person has probably stopped to think about it, too.
Does that give you a set of hard-and-fast rules for date definition? Not exactly, but in reality, the date-label doesn't really matter. A date is meant as a way to get to know someone better, but you can do that in non-date-like circumstances, too. Regardless of date-status, if spending time together works out, it can still evolve into a real, unquestioned date in the future.
--
Emily Maretsky is a senior majoring in engineering psychology. She can be reached at Emily.Maretsky@tufts.edu.
