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Dating Safety: telling your friends?
12 March 2012
We've written our own guide to dating safety but we've noticed that a few sites and "experts" on the web such as (name of person + website address of this article) talk how you should "Give your best friend all the information about your date." as if she does not hear from you by the next morning then "something could be very wrong".
In reality, most people do not do this as it is clunky and impractical for a first or second date. They don't want their friend(s) to know about every single date they are going on. "What you're meeting ANOTHER guy???!"
Let's think about this for a second. Your friend doing something when you "don't turn up the next morning" is most probably going to be way too late to help you - unless you are actually kidnapped in the classic sense (odds of this = miniscule). The most likely total worst case scenario is that you get attacked in some way. Thankfully this is very unlikely (though more likely than a kidnap scenario I'd say) - but just suppose you are - it's going to happen on the night of the date not the day after.
How is your friend going to even know where you are to tell the police to go rescue you? Well, you might have be going to the guy's house you may say. Well, if you read any proper dating safety advice you would realise you should not be going to the house or apartment or any other private place with some guy you don't really know. For the first few times you should be meeting in a public place - that's a bar, restaurant, cafe, cinema, etc. You also should not be accepting a lift in his car - nor giving him one in yours.
OK - so you're going to a public place ...so what is the point of your friend knowing you are going to "All Bar One" in Leicester Square with Doctor Dave from Putney? How does that make you "more safe"?
Can you give your friend the full name or traceable details of your date? This presumes that you know his full real name yourself. Presumably you'll have followed our advice and not given this guy your surname. You don't want him Googling you then turning up to your work to find out why you didn't call him back. Vice-versa he may well not want to trust a first date with his surname and other personal details - just in case you turn out to be Glen Close from Fatal Attraction.
We don't really see the point in why people recommend this for first dates. For later on when you get to know the guy and his friends and go round his house- then there's an argument for this.
However, getting a false sense of security that "I've told my friend about my date" is certainly one thing we want members to avoid. Your choice about where you go on the first/second date is the important thing - choose some place that means it makes it irrelevant that your friend knows where you are.
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