So you’ve matched with a promising guy or gal, and you’ve shared some witty banter on the in-app chat. What’s next? I recommend that my clients schedule a screening phone call. Yes, a phone call.1 This may sound old-school (and tends to particularly weird out millennials), but hear me out. There are a few advantages to doing this before setting up an in-person date:
It’s a synchronous communication format with very low overhead. You don’t have the lag of texting, and you also don’t have the scheduling and primping overhead of meeting IRL. The level of investment is somewhere between messaging and getting together, so it’s a nice intermediate step. A corollary is that the downside risk is low — if the chemistry or alignment isn’t there, you can get out in a few minutes. How many dates have you had where it was obvious within the first few words that it wasn’t a good match, but you felt obligated to sit through it for a while anyway? Not so with a phone call! You can assess non-visual cues that can indicate whether or not you have a good connection — e.g. do they have a pleasing vocal tone, are they able to hold a good conversational cadence without talking over you, do they have a compatible sense of humor? It provides enough distance where you feel safe opening up, yet close enough that you get a sense of building rapport and connection. This means that you can figure out if someone’s willing to “show up” to the conversation. Can they have a meaningful dialogue? Are they comfortable getting vulnerable? Before jumping on a call, there is some homework to do first. Part of creating a successful phone screen is coming up with an idea of what the guiding questions for the conversation are. A good phone screen question has two key characteristics:
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