This page is my online dating course, from the profile to the first meeting. It holds five lessons: how I wrote the profile I met my wife on, how I set my search, how I found out who was interested before I wrote anything, and how I turned a message into a lunch. The goal in all of them is the same. Get to a real face to face meeting without wasting weeks on someone you have not met.
I recorded these lessons in December 2014 and January 2015, and I was married then. These are part 3 of 6 of my course "How to Date, Fall in Love, and Live Happy Ever After in a Relationship." The dating websites I describe are the ones of that time, around 2015, and I name Match.com because that is where I met my wife. The features I mention, like winks, belong to those sites as they were then. My marriage ended in divorce in December 2025. I'm a single dad of two in St. Petersburg, Florida, and in the year since I've been on about fifty dates and have no lasting relationship yet. I've left the lessons exactly as I recorded them.
In Making a great dating profile, I show the actual profile I met my wife on and say the only thing it needs to do is work. I say the picture comes first, that it should be current, and that someone else should take it, not a selfie. I tell the story that my full body picture undersold me, and my wife was pleasantly surprised when she met me. I say to be honest on every question, including height, kids and drinking, and to open with one strong first sentence and tell your own stories instead of "I like long walks on the beach." What you're reading, I say, was about the 200th version of my description.
In Make broad and relevant search criteria, I say to go broad on age and distance so you have around 2,000 potential matches instead of a few. I explain that my wife was at the maximum of my driving distance, an hour away, so a shorter distance would have hidden her. My advice is to keep no more than three absolute deal breakers. Mine were smoking, wanting kids and wanting an education.
In Establish mutual interest before sending a message, I tell how I made the same mistake hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I got excited about a profile, wrote a long message, got no reply, and felt horrible. On Match.com I used up my winks every day, 50 of them, on girls whose picture did not put me off, and I only messaged the ones who winked back. My wife was one of them. If all else fails, I say, just ask.
In The goal of a message is getting a face to face meeting, I say the only job of a message is to set up a meeting, because your body reacts honestly when you first see someone. I tell the story of spending weeks messaging and calling one girl. When we met, my first thought was disappointment, and I still spent three months with her. I say that cost both of us.
In How to convert the message into a date and what to plan, I recommend a quick, low pressure lunch in a public place. I say to ask around the third to sixth message, that the person asking carries the responsibility, and that you should offer to meet near where they live. I also say to exchange phone numbers sooner rather than later, because my wife and I only did at the last minute.
The course continues in First Date Guide: What to Plan, What to Avoid, and How to Follow Up. If you want what came before this, start with Getting Ready to Date: Become the Partner You Want to Attract. I now work with people one on one as a dating coach.
On this page
Every lesson is below in full, in course order, each under its own heading.
- 13) Making a great dating profile (early 2015)
- 14) Make broad and relevant search criteria (January 15, 2015)
- 15) Establish mutual interest before sending a message (December 29, 2014)
- 16) The goal of a message is getting a face to face meeting (December 29, 2014)
- 17) How to convert the message into a date and what to plan (December 29, 2014)
13) Making a great dating profile
From my video recorded in early 2015.
Here's how to make a great dating profile online. The only thing that matters with your dating profile is that it works. So here's my actual dating profile that I met my wife on, and the only thing that's important to remember with this is that it worked, and that's all your dating profile needs to do: work.
The profile picture comes first
There are a few things that are critical. Obviously, the profile picture is the single most important thing on your profile. If you have a bad profile picture, you are not likely to get very many dates, and you have to work with what you have. You only have what you have with yourself, and there's no point in whining, complaining, being upset or being frustrated. That's irrelevant. If you want to meet someone, you use what you have. That can mean getting someone else to take a picture of you. That can mean getting professional photos done. That can even mean getting a graphic designer to make something cool out of your existing photo. But basically, it should just be a down to earth, regular picture of you, and all it has to do is work. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect, but you want to do a good job with getting a picture. I wrote more about this in Men on Dating Apps: Look Your Best or Stick to In Person.
Here's an interesting thing, though. My picture is a full body picture of me, so you can tell a good bit about me from it, but you can't see my face that well. My wife was pleasantly surprised when she saw me, because she didn't know how good I looked from my pictures, and I looked better than she expected. Another guy she went out with had the opposite impact on her. I can tell you, it's always better to undersell yourself and then impress than it is to oversell yourself and disappoint. You never want to disappoint, so if that means you have to use a picture that's not the greatest of you, or have a friend take a picture with you, that's fine. I recommend having a picture someone else took, not a selfie, but you can work with what you've got.
Say something honest and original in your own words
The profile picture is obviously crucial, but the "in your own words" section is crucial, too. Again, in my own words it's not necessarily perfect. It is honest, and it shares a story of what I did. If you notice, my profile is about what I have done and what I do, instead of a lot of ambiguous things. It shows what I do, so it allows someone to make a decision based on reading what I've done.
The challenge with making a dating profile is often the words. The words are endlessly frustrating a lot of the time. I know this, because what you're seeing is probably the literal 200th iteration of my dating profile description. That's okay. If you need to change how you explain yourself every other day, that's fine. Just keep working at it, and listen to the feedback you get. If people are saying good things about your profile, then don't change a lot on it. If people are saying they don't like things on your profile, or they're not saying anything about your profile, it's not very good. Either it's bland, or it's a cliche profile. The thing with my profile is that it's original. It has a real story on it. Even though my wife didn't exactly think it was the most impressive story ever, it was original. It got her attention, it got her to message me, and it got her to go out with me.
That's the whole idea of your profile. Think of it like sales. You're trying to use your profile to convert someone to meeting you. That's what you're trying to do with it.
Be honest on every question
It's important to be honest on all of these questions. If that means sometimes you give your best version of yourself, that's okay. But on things like relationship status, never married, you should absolutely be 100 percent honest. For height, you go to your doctor's office or somewhere and get officially measured. You should never add inches to your height, especially for men dating women, because women often like to date men taller than them. You have to put your real height on there. It's a biological feature. And on things like whether you have kids, you shouldn't ever be ambiguous. Either you have kids or you don't. There's nothing in the middle. Even if your partner is pregnant, you don't have a kid yet. So have kids, yes or no, with nothing awkward about it. You should also always disclose as much as possible. For example, you don't want to just leave something off like smoking because you're trying to quit. If you're trying to quit, you make the decision on how to answer it, whatever it is you want to be able to deal with.
On mine, the one or maybe two key issues I could put on there were body type and drinking. For body type, I went with athletic and toned. I felt that was honest because I was in good physical shape. I still am athletic and toned now, and for a lot of my life I'd been like that, so it fit me. I certainly could have put a different body type, and I'm sure some women looked at that and thought, yeah, right, based on my picture. But you just do whatever you can feel good about. I felt good about athletic and toned, so I put that on there.
Now, drinking. I am an alcoholic, so I don't drink anymore. I'm grateful for that. I go to AA, and I struggled with that a lot in my life. At the time I made this profile, moderately was about the best way I could put it. I was drinking heavily two or three days a week, or I would drink more lightly four or five days a week. Interestingly, my wife's memory was that she did not go out with anyone who listed more than social drinker, because to her that indicated alcoholic. The only higher level you could put drinking on, on Match.com, was daily. Since I did not drink daily, I did not put daily, and I think moderately was the second highest option. So you just do your best with what you've got. I knew I had issues with drinking before I made a dating profile, and I did my best on there to be honest about it. Since I didn't drink every day, I put moderate. You are likely to have issues with something on your profile, and it's always best to be as honest as possible with it. Faith, for example, can be challenging for a lot of people. I put faith Christian Protestant, although I rarely interacted with that and didn't do much with it. But I put on there what I thought I was.
Keep your picture current
So you want to do your best with your dating profile. I hope I've given you a good overview of what that involves. It involves a good, real picture of yourself that is absolutely current. I didn't hit on that before, but your dating profile has to be current, especially with women. I've heard and seen a lot of women talk about men who put up a picture from a year ago. That is the worst thing you can do, especially if you're heavier now or if something happened to your face. You're setting up a disappointing first meeting by doing that. You want to present a current picture, preferably from today or yesterday.
With me, again, I didn't do the best job on this, because I didn't get a lot of pictures taken of me. The picture I actually used on my profile was the same one I'd used six months before when I first made it. When I made my profile, that was a current picture. But then I got a girlfriend for a while, and when I came back on Match.com, I didn't switch my profile picture a few months later. You want to use a profile picture that presents a current image of yourself, so it looks very close to how you actually look. There's tolerance in these things. If you have a profile picture that is three months old and you look the same way, that's fine. If you have a picture you really like but you're 20 pounds heavier now, I wouldn't go with that. Again, it only matters what actually works for you. That could work for you, but more than likely you're going to run into problems doing that. So use as current a picture as you can and as honest a profile as you can, and especially in your own words on the profile, try to say something original. Often I look through and read what other guys wrote. That's not a good idea. Just tell your story.
The first sentence and your own stories
Here's the key summary for the profile. Besides the picture, there's one very small part of the profile that makes a big impression, and that's the very first sentence. You might want to share in that first sentence what I shared: I enjoy making the girl I'm with feel special and pride myself on being as loyal as any man I know. To me, those were two of my best selling points, and then I immediately said I'm hoping to find a woman who can handle my strength and intellect. Up front, some woman might look at that and think, what a disaster, and another woman might look at it and think, wow, that's just the kind of guy I want, one who is prepared to offer that. So you want to immediately communicate exactly who you are and what you want, and then maybe tell some stories about yourself instead of trying to describe yourself generically. "I like long walks on the beach." You've heard all those generic things before. Those are some of the worst things you can put in a profile. Share some stories about yourself. Be honest and do your best with what you've got.
You can see my profile is not 100 percent perfect. Certainly you could critique it, I'm sure, but the fact is it worked, and all that matters with your profile is that it works to get you actual dates in person. If your profile is not working to get you dates in person, then change it. If it's getting you dates with the wrong type of people, then you might want to make small changes. If you are consistently getting dates that seem close but not quite right, you have a good profile, so don't mess with it too much. I also shared what my profile looks like today in I Installed Hinge Again After Deleting 3 Times. Here's My New Dating Profile, and you can find more lessons like this in my Dating playlist.
14) Make broad and relevant search criteria
From my video published January 15, 2015.
For your dating profile search criteria, you want to make sure you go broad rather than super specific. It's better to have 2,000 potential matches than it is to have just a few. The reason is that then you can consistently work each day to do icebreakers, and you have the best shot at finding someone to message. If you have 2,000 different people to choose from, you can also know that there will be consistent what's called churn. So if you're looking, as I was, for a girl to date, girls will constantly be closing and turning off their profiles as they find guys, and there will be new girls coming on every day too.
Go broad on age, distance and the rest
If you make your search criteria too small, it's hard to see exactly where the right person is. So always try to broaden the age if possible. Always try to broaden the location to the maximum driving distance if possible. Always try to do things, if possible, to broaden your options, because what you need is mutual interest. Lots of times you might screen out the right person just because you thought something on their profile might not be right.
There are certain things, of course, that are not negotiable. Maybe smoking or maybe drinking is not negotiable for you, for example. If you live in a big enough metro area, you might be able to get away with that. But if you live in a place where there aren't that many people, it really is important to broaden your search criteria. And even if you live somewhere huge like New York City, or like the Tampa metro area where I met my wife, having 2,000 plus matches is a really good thing. You want to be able to go and do icebreakers with the maximum number of people every day, and then you can just respond to the ones who give you an icebreaker back and go from there.
Do not screen out the right person
Broad search criteria help you not screen out the right person. What I've seen people do is get too specific. They say, I don't want someone who smokes or drinks too much, or who is older than me, and they have to have a graduate degree, and they have to live within 10 miles of me. The more difficult you make your search criteria, the smaller your potential to find the right person. My wife was at the maximum of my driving distance, an hour away from me in St. Petersburg when we met. Imagine if I'd set the distance shorter. I wouldn't even have seen her pop up on there.
So you want to find the areas where you really are critical. For example, if smoking is an absolute deal breaker, that might be good. But I would only pick a maximum of three absolute deal breakers and then try to be more flexible on other things. For me, smoking was up there, and wanting kids was an absolute also, and then wanting an education. Are those the best three to pick? Not necessarily. The idea is you want to pick a few areas where you are inflexible. The more options a website gives you, the more problems you can have finding people to meet. It's better to cast a wide net and see what you get out of it than to cast only a small net and be frustrated that there's nothing to get out of it.
I hope this input on how to set your search criteria, and how to interact with more people, will be helpful for you in finding a date faster online. I also wrote about this approach in Less Matches Is More: A Better Way to Use Dating Apps, and there are more lessons in my Dating playlist.
15) Establish mutual interest before sending a message
From my video published December 29, 2014.
For dating, it's really important to establish mutual interest before you invest almost any time or energy into it. The problem is, if you invest more time and energy before you verify mutual interest, you're highly likely to waste your time. One of the biggest mistakes I made, especially dating online, but this works in person a lot too, was to invest all this time and energy and excitement in getting to know someone I didn't even know was available. Even if someone has an online dating profile up, that doesn't mean they're 100 percent available. In fact, lots of times, people's availability when dating online goes in and out very quickly. One week a person will be available for you to date. The next week they'll have gone out with someone and they won't be, and they won't be paying attention to their dating profile.
Mutual interest is all that matters
So it's critical to always establish mutual interest. It makes no difference if you feel interested in someone and they do not feel interested back. It's completely irrelevant if there's no mutual interest, because if you want to have an amazing, successful relationship, there must be mutual interest. They have to like you also. I know this is frustrating. I made this mistake hundreds, if not thousands, of times. You have probably made it and will make it again, but that's okay, as long as you're consciously aware that mutual interest is all that matters. Your interest and their interest do not matter unless they both exist together. You don't have to make that mistake as many times as I did. You don't have to put all of your interest and hopes into people who aren't available over and over again like I did.
Send icebreakers first, then messages
For example, on dating profiles online, you want to send an icebreaker whenever possible. A wink, or whatever your site gives you to send. You want to send an icebreaker first, before you send a message. It's better to send a lot of icebreakers out and not be very picky about that. Then be picky about who you start messaging, and a little more picky about who you actually go out with. You cast a wide net of icebreakers just to establish mutual interest, and then you continue to refine that down. If you're into marketing, it's just like a funnel.
What a lot of people do, and what I did a ton in dating, is go straight into maximum interest. If I saw a girl's profile online and got really excited, I wanted to go straight to maximum interest. Oh my gosh, this is so exciting, we might get married and have a family and be buried together. I would send a message with all that enthusiasm and energy. And then guess how I'd feel when she didn't even respond. I felt horrible. Then came all those negative thoughts and negative thinking patterns along with it. Well, dating's no good, online dating doesn't work. Oh, I'm not worth going out with. All of these unfounded negative patterns for no reason at all. In fact, the only mistake I had made was to put too much energy into an opportunity when I had no idea whether it was actually there or not.
How I did it on Match.com
With my wife, I got lucky in the sense that I was aware of this. On Match.com, I would max out my winks every day. I would set a search criteria that gave me around 2,000 girls in the Tampa area that matched it. I would max out my winks every day, and in maxing out my winks, I could then work with only the girls who winked back at me. My wife was one of many girls who winked back at me. I then sent her a message after looking at her profile. I sent some other girls messages after looking at their profiles too. But most of the girls who winked back, I did not send messages to. I didn't even bother to look at their profiles before I winked. I just quickly went in and winked at 50 girls who did not totally put me off in their profile picture, and then I paid attention to the girls who winked back at me, because there is potential for mutual interest there. If a girl is not going to wink back at me, then why send her a message?
It's a progression, just like in business. With sales, you don't try to take someone straight to the big sale, or start thinking you're going to get a huge sale immediately. You start small. You figure out if there's an opportunity. You get to know each other a little better, and then you look to see what's possible after that. I also wrote about this in Less Matches Is More: A Better Way to Use Dating Apps.
If all else fails, just ask
The simple version of this is to establish mutual interest before investing anything, especially your feelings. A profile online means nothing by itself. You want to establish that a person might be interested in you. And if all else fails, just ask them. All that fear of getting rejected is irrelevant, and it all holds you back. If you like someone, especially if they're in person and you know them, just ask them. There's no use guessing. There's no use doing anything else. Just ask them. Do you like me? Will you go out with me? It's that simple. It eliminates hundreds of hours of thought and guessing and goes directly to the source. If they tell you no, it's over, and you can try asking another girl or guy out. It's that simple. Establish mutual interest before sending any kind of message, and do it with the least friction possible. You can find more lessons like this in my Dating playlist.
16) The goal of a message is getting a face to face meeting
From my video published December 29, 2014.
Once you've established mutual interest, the goal in a message is to get a face to face meeting. Nothing else matters except a face to face meeting, because your body will judge a lot. Your body will know almost immediately after meeting someone what it thinks. If you get to be aware, if you notice the thoughts you have, the impression you get and how your body reacts when you first meet someone, it's incredibly honest. Therefore, you want to use the messaging, or any communication systems available in online dating, to set up an in person meeting. The goal of a message is only to get a face to face meeting.
The mistake of weeks of messaging
I again have made the mistake of investing too many feelings into an online dating system where I'm just sending messages to a girl who has a dating profile, a real person behind it, but who ultimately was just sending me messages through the computer, and it was hard to tell anything about the actual person. I made one bad mistake with that, where I spent weeks messaging and calling a girl. When I met her in person, my body reacted poorly. The first thought that went through my head when I saw her was disappointment.
The problem was that it was really hard for me to stop at that point. It was hard to just tell her, look, I'm sorry, I made a mistake here, I'm not happy. It was hard to exit because I'd already invested so much in my mind. So I went out with her again, and we ended up becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. I ended up spending three months with a girl I didn't like at the very beginning. To be fair, she probably had the same impression, or a similar one, because people tend to react the very same way to each other. If I'm being most honest, if I'm reacting negatively to you, you more than likely will react negatively to me. Our energy was not matched well together. That was the first time I had put so much energy into getting to know someone online and then met in person and had it be so drastically different.
Do not get emotionally involved before you meet
The goal of messaging is only to get an in person meeting, because you do not under any circumstances want to get emotionally invested with a person you have not met. I know firsthand exactly how much that costs. I knew very soon after dating her that I had made a mistake. I knew as soon as I walked up to see her that I didn't want to be there. The problem was that I tried to do more than establish a face to face meeting with the messaging. I wanted to jump straight into a full blown relationship, and I wanted to do that online. You want to meet them in person to give your body a chance to react to them. You want to give yourself a chance to really see them and get to know them, because pictures, and even Skype, and any communication you do, does not do justice to what you can immediately, instantly see as soon as you meet someone.
The entire goal of a message is only a face to face meeting. No other goals, no other plans. If you live too far away for a face to face meeting to be convenient, you might want to consider narrowing the radius that you search in. If you do live far away, that is not a reason to avoid working immediately toward a face to face meeting. If that means you have to get on a plane to meet them, that's fine. Anything is better than wasting your time and wasting someone else's time, because it's ultimately about both. You never just waste your time all by itself. I wasted not only my time, but three months of her time too. For more on this, see Never Get Rejected Again in Dating.
You want to meet in person as soon as possible, because the sooner you meet in person, the less likely you've developed all these feelings and expectations. If you've built up all these expectations and feelings from talking online and doing all of that through messages, then there's this horrible pressure when you meet that you have to push straight into having a relationship. It's a horrible, miserable way to go about dating online. Of course you can get lucky, and of course it can work out. But as a general rule, the only message you want to send is a request for a face to face meeting at some point soon. That's your goal with messages. Your goal is not to get attached and find a relationship. It's to meet in person. You can find more in my Dating playlist.
17) How to convert the message into a date and what to plan
From my video published December 29, 2014.
Once you've sent a message, the question is, what should you plan? My advice, based on what's worked for me, is to plan a meeting in a public place for a quick meal where there's no pressure, and that's it. Lunch tends to work really well. That's what worked for my wife and me, and I tried about every other scenario. I think even dinner is too much pressure for a first meeting. With lunch, there's the expectation of just meeting and getting to know each other a little bit, because ultimately what you want to do is get a first impression of that person. It never gets easier to leave and quit. You want to make a short, no pressure meeting so that you can very quickly get a first impression and then have time to go back to the rest of your life.
Why a low pressure lunch works
If you don't like the person, it's very easy not to go out again. The less pressure there is on the meeting, the easier it is to move out of a bad situation. If you meet a person and you don't want to go out with them again, a low pressure lunch date is the best way to screen people out. It's also the best way to see where your excitement is. When I met my wife and we had lunch, I knew I wanted to go out with her again. Then it was easier to plan something like a dinner date, because both of us knew we wanted to go out with the other person again. There's a lot less pressure associated with a quick lunch date than with a dinner date.
It's also much less pressure out in public than somewhere private, like your home. You want to make the date in public so that there's not the expectation of doing all of these other things, like making out and having sex. You want to plan a place where you can just meet the person, because that's the best way to get a quick impression and decide if you want to go further. You plan a place to meet in public for a quick meal because everyone ultimately eats. You can't say that everyone ultimately goes bowling or plays video games, but you know everyone needs to eat. If someone has eating habits that don't match yours, and you have a hard time scheduling a date with them because of that, hey, that might be a great opportunity not to go out with them at all.
The idea of scheduling something simple is that you very quickly get to the point and don't get anything else involved. You make the face to face meeting the entire point of the messaging. That means you just introduce yourself quickly in messages, but say you want a low pressure meeting. Some people online want to send all of these messages and build up a huge rapport with someone, and then the problem is they want a high pressure meeting after that: a dinner date with the expectation of going home together. That's way too much pressure, because then you start mixing in things like wanting to have sex regardless of who the person actually is. A lunch date takes out a lot of that potential problem. The nice thing is that a lunch date is easy to ask for. There's no reason you can't go out to lunch with nearly anyone. There are a lot more reasons you might not want to take someone to dinner and feel all the pressure associated with that.
If you live a lifestyle where dinner is kind of a midday meal and not pressured, sure, breakfast might also work. You don't have to do it exactly that way, but pick a low pressure, low stakes meal with the clear expectation that all you're going to do is eat together. You're not going to spend the day together. You're not going to go home and have sex. You just meet them, get a first impression, and then move on and see if you want to see them again. And again, mutual interest: they have to feel the same way about you. A low stakes lunch meeting makes it easier to accept rejection. When you go out to dinner with someone and you have all these expectations, it's a lot harder to take rejection also. If you have a quick lunch meeting with someone and they don't like you, it's a lot easier to deal with because you haven't started to expect all these things.
When to ask, and who asks
When you're messaging someone, around the third to sixth message usually, but maybe sooner, maybe a little later but not too much, I suggest a quick, low pressure lunch meeting. Maybe Starbucks. If you don't want to do lunch, maybe breakfast. Choose some low pressure scenario where there is not the expectation of, hey, let's get out of here and spend the day together, or hey, let's go home and have sex. It's just a quick meeting, the same as if you were doing business with someone and stopped to have lunch with them, or meeting a friend real quick: hey, let's go have lunch. You might not casually spend the day with a friend. That's something you have to know someone for. So don't look at a date online especially the same way. It should start small and grow. Messaging should lead up to you asking them for a quick in person meeting.
Here's what's great about this. If they don't want to meet you in person, why do you want to keep talking with them? If they don't respond to your message, why do you want to keep thinking about them? This whole process involves eliminating as many people as fast as possible while not eliminating people who might be interested in you. If they have a little bit of a challenge scheduling something, that's okay. But the easiest way to deal with that is usually to exchange numbers. My wife and I sent several messages and then planned a place to meet.
It's easier if you ask for the meeting to offer to meet closer to you. If they ask for the meeting, you can still offer to meet closer to them. But if you ask, it's always easier to ask them to go a short distance from their home to come meet you at some place they are familiar with. So if you ask for the meeting, ask them if they will pick out a place near where they live, so that they feel safe and comfortable since you asked. Ultimately, if you want to meet someone, the responsibility to ask is on you. If they happen to ask first, great. It's up to you to ask. If you are sitting back waiting for them to ask and getting frustrated that they won't ask you out, then you need to ask them out immediately. I wrote more about this in Men and Dating in 2026: Why I Say Men Must Make the Move.
Exchange phone numbers
I hope that's been really clear. You take a system of finding mutual interest, then your goal of messaging is to get a face to face meeting, and then you plan your face to face meeting somewhere in public with a quick meal and no pressure. To make that meeting happen, you will generally need to exchange phone numbers, in order to notify the other person in case of an emergency or in case something comes up. People do cancel. People do have things happen. It's up to you whether you want to accept someone canceling on you or not. But it's certainly nice, if you can't make it for any reason, to let the other person know. If you are the one who cancels, you need to make a counter offer. Say, okay, I couldn't make it today, but how about tomorrow? Phone numbers really help with this. My wife and I didn't exchange numbers until the very last minute, so I recommend exchanging numbers sooner rather than later.
You have to go forward on this with an understanding of the potential problems. Yes, there could be a potential problem, but it's not so crazy that someone gets hold of your number, and you can easily block them with most phones. It's not something to worry about. So go for that quick meeting. Plan a meeting in public for a quick meal with no pressure, and then offer your phone number in case something comes up, but not necessarily to chit chat before you actually meet. You can find more lessons in my Dating playlist.