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‘Serial daters’ Vs ‘One-at-the-time daters’

I have two good male friends and one female friend who seem to have a date pretty much every other day and they love the pace! I also have 2 friends of each gender who only date very occasionally i.e. once or twice a year, but when they do they seem to have very high expectations for that one date which can easily cause unnecessary upset.

So, which formula works better? Well, if you think of dating as ‘numbers game’ which it can be, it would have to be the former which Mary Balfour calls the ‘Domino-dating’ formula: the more people you meet the more chance you have of meeting the right one. This is especially effective when using an internet dating site where it’s easy to arrange dates for every single night of the week if you’ve got the time!

What agencies like Drawing Down the Moon can do is to help people who are busy professionals who don’t have time or the inclination to scroll through Internet dating sites – people who want someone else to do the ‘leg-work’ for them.

My opinion is the more avenues you explore the better!

What would be your preference?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2012 at 11:39 am and is filed under Dating, Drawing Down the Moon, Mary Balfour, Matchmakers, Meeting New People, Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Why Career Women Reject Internet Dating

The internet is creating a growing asymmetry of expectations between men and women in the dating market. Men are increasingly turning away from personal introduction agencies in order to take advantage of the cheaper, more techy and more impersonal medium of the internet agencies.

Women, on the other hand, want the greater security, ID checks and selectivity of personal agencies. That’s why there is an increasing gender imbalance in both kinds of services. And that’s why Drawing Down the Moon, adopting HR industry techniques, now headhunts for men to introduce to their high flying women members. Their team of ambassadors, working on handsome commission, seek out high calibre, relationship-minded men (and some women) in all sorts of venues: gallery openings, book launches, professional associations, sports events, gatherings of one sort or another.

MD, Mary Balfour, is ‘never off-duty’ & even recruited a lovely guy via the airport check-in queue and another via Freecycle.com – where she lost no time in enquiring whether a handsome TV director was single – she was seeking a new home for a vintage film projector!

Call us on 020 7224 1001 10.30am – 11pm 7 Days a week.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 20th, 2011 at 11:50 am and is filed under Dating, Drawing Down the Moon, Mary Balfour, Meeting New People, Online, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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Share Your Best and Worst Dating Stories

We have a new Facebook page for you to share your best & worst date stories! They will be rated by Mary Balfour, dating expert! http://ow.ly/3ksRx

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 6th, 2010 at 11:30 am and is filed under Dating, Drawing Down the Moon, Mary Balfour, Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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Mary’s Domino Dating Strategy – make it work for you.

Domino Dating gives you the chance to practice

The Domino Dating Strategy suggests that if you are prepared to date more people – anyone who’s at least ‘roughly right’ – you will get more practice which will set up a ripple effect and create more confidence and skill in handling dating situations. To increase your success rate, you must expect to increase your failure rate, too. You need to meet more frogs/frog-esses if you are to meet more princes/princesses! If you’re only meeting one available single every two or three years, then too bad if they don’t turn out to be right for you – they’re all that’s on offer. Go for volume, on the other hand, and you give yourself plenty of choice.

Also, if you’re doing Domino Dating, the extra practice will help to make you more relaxed about going on first dates.  If you’re not relaxed you can’t flirt, and you won’t be giving out the right signals to intrigue your date.  Thus they won’t want to flirt with you and thus you wont find them attractive.

Flirting and the Domino Dating Effect

The Domino Dating Effect is central to learning new flirt skills. By aiming to date as many eligible people as possible, you create a ripple of even more dates – really useful flirt practice and you meet other interesting singles in the process. Furthermore, one of these interesting singles may turn out to be that someone special! You can even practise on the non-runners – BUT keep the boundaries absolutely clear between friendly and sexy flirting so that you don’t mislead them.

Remember, just consider whether they’d be fun to meet and talk with again. Could they be a friend? From this viewpoint, you can get to know several dates as friends and see how things develop. The chances are that one of these could turn into something special, or could lead to another introduction that is the one for you. Play the field, go for volume and meet as many dates as possible. When you meet the right one, you’ll be in good practice for giving out positive messages and be more likely to judge the situation accurately. If previously you’ve been on only a few dates, you’ll be much less able to judge the potential.

Providing, on every date, you make it clear that you’re seeing other people, it’s fine to explore multiple friendships. The more time you take to get to know one another before the chemistry ignites (and not just the sexual tinder), the more powerful and enduring all that follows will be.

If in any doubt, leave the possibility of a further meeting on the back burner. You can simply use the old standby: ‘Maybe one of us can give the other a ring in a week or two’. It does, in fact, take the pressure off people to know that you’re not expecting anything too dramatic at this early stage. They are perpetually concerned that they’ll be thought to be ‘leading you on’ and then getting lumbered with all sorts of expectations that they can’t live up to. Rather than risk this, they’ll play it too cool and not ring at all – so leave the door open.

But when you feel you’ve found some special chemistry, that’s the time to cease Domino Dating and concentrate on developing the new relationship. Domino Dating must not be confused with Serial Dating where you flit like a butterfly through an endless series of dates without exploring any of them.

The Domino Dating effect is, I believe, one of the key opportunities for dating success. To remind you once again, with Domino Dating the more dates you have with men or women who are roughly right, but may not be Mr or Ms Perfect, the more confident and positive you’ll feel. Also, your network of contacts will grow and you might even end up with your date’s brother or sister or a new job!

The most important result will be to overcome (or greatly minimize) the biggest obstacle – fear of failure. If you fail with one particular date, you know that there will still be plenty more in the pipeline! Just keep saying ‘Next!’ if they don’t happen to work out.  Make Domino Dynamics work for you!

Good luck!  Mary Balfour

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Dating, Flirting, Mary Balfour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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Mary's Own Happy Ending

My man number one was a 6’ 6” (!) alpha male. He positively towered above me. However, by way of practical, manly skills he was utterly hopeless. I well recall an early date – a first-night performance at London’s Royal Opera House after which I found I had a flat tyre. Who changed the wheel? I did, clad in full-length gold lamé and false eyelashes top and bottom – egged on by the cheers of Covent Garden Market porters while my alpha male sat in my car reading an erudite journal. I loved it – and I loved him. We were to have many wonderful years together. We’re still best friends and I adore his wife and children.

Man number two was 5’ 4½” inches tall – although it wasn’t apparent at first sight because of several inches of Afro-style hair on top (it was a long time ago). However, his Irish charm, wit and eccentricity were the great attractions. Our first date was a picnic beside the river Thames during which I thought that he’d had a heart attack, so loud was a sudden scream he emitted. This Irishman was genuinely terrified of a tiny mouse that had attacked our baguette and brie, necessitating a rapid departure to a ‘safer’ spot – much to my amusement! We went on to have several happy, if bumpy, years together and now my husband and I often visit him and his wife in the South of France.

Man number three was first spotted, with a worried look on his face, moving a large lawn mower into a fourth floor, gardenless flat next to mine. He was, I discovered, to be my new neighbour. For starters, his 5’ 8½” of height was well short of mine when I was perched on my killer heels. I had heard that he was freshly separated and had two young children, now living abroad, so I guessed there would be past-life pitfalls aplenty. I reminded myself that my avowed policy, as a singleton in this type of situation, was to run extremely fast in the opposite direction. However, I couldn’t help but be just a little curious, so I spied on him that evening through my darkened window. A sight met my eyes that, in those days, would have made most women very nervous: he was washing up – OK, that’s great, I’ll allow – but wearing PINK rubber gloves! Sexy? No way!

Love at first sight? Forget it; but yes, you’ve guessed, we grew to love each other madly and could not now be happier than we are – admittedly after having tiptoed around loads of old problems. Sebastian’s passion, romantic spirit, wit, kindness, boyish charm and twinkly green eyes still have me weak at the knees. We’ve been married for years, but we’d never have got off the starting blocks if I’d stuck to that Perfect Partner List. As for finding a man who remembers to put down the toilet seat every time, forget it girls. But hey, it’s a small price to pay for true love.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 9th, 2010 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Mary Balfour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.