How to recover from a bad second date?
The answer to the question of how to recover from a bad second date depends on what happened on the date.
Whether we're talking about an emotional recovery because you did something very embarrassing, your date was really bad, or you're talking about recovering after that second date so you can get another date with that girl because you still like her.
We’ll explore both dating recovery challenges.
To be clear, this will help you recover from a bad second date, first date, third date, it doesn't matter. It's going to help you recover from any bad date.
You can put your head up high and get your dating life back on track. Let's get into it.
To recover from a bad second date or any date, it's going to require some introspection.
You have to look deep inside and see what the f*** happened. Although, if you're reading this, you may not know what the f*** happened.
We're going to talk about how to figure out that as well, so you can get better at dating and avoid this in the future.
But first, let's separate the two types of recovery.
First, we'll handle your emotional recovery, then we'll handle how to get her back.
To recover emotionally from a bad date, obviously it's going to matter how bad we're talking about.
Did you spill a drink on her? Use some rude words? Get wasted drunk and start mouthing off at everyone around you, and things just went super awkward afterwards?
Well, if you did something embarrassing, it doesn't have to be that bad.
If you did something embarrassing and you want to get over it, follow these steps:
Breathing will calm your nervous system.
You could actually do this while you're on your date to interrupt the action that's happening here that's ruining everything, or after the date when you realize: "Oh s***, I screwed up".
You start getting into a bit of that panic emotion and breathing shallowly.
You don't want to breathe shallowly, because that's going to increase the feeling of that negative emotion.
After all, this is just one date. Even if she was awesome, hot, whatever the case may be, or you just behaved inappropriately and now you're feeling bad about it.
It's just one date. It's not the end of the world. You have to put that in perspective.
Start thinking forward about the next date.
You want to start planning for what you're going to do differently on the next date, so it's not going to end up like this last one.
Keep in mind that every time you go through some kind of difficult situation like this, whether it's embarrassment or something that's challenging in another way, it'll give you a thicker skin.
When you face scrutiny or you know you screwed up, as long as you can put that in perspective, it can help you get stronger about it and feel less embarrassed.
That means get out and start talking to more women. Go get some more dates and start practicing to be better.
So, you had a bad date and you want to fix your mistakes? Good.
But how do you get her back?
This can be really tricky, but it may be worth the try.
Keep in mind that every first date you go on or second or third date, they are basically all first impressions. You're getting to know each other.
When something bad happens like this, or you have an awkward moment that seems like it ruins everything, very often that's an impression that you're left with.
Now they're going to be associating you with that thing that happened, and it's very hard to recover from that.
Your odds of coming back are low depending on how bad the "incident" was, but not impossible.
Try the following to try to get your date back:
Apologies should be used very sparingly.
This is usually the go to for the typical "nice guy" and you don't want to be relying on that and apologizing for everything all the time. It's just not a good look.
It doesn't look confident and nobody respects that. However, if you are truly in the wrong, being upfront, apologizing about it and admitting that you're wrong is a really good thing.
You can make a joke about the date, make a joke about the thing that happened and try to make light of it, basically.
Just tell her, "hey, I was nervous, and I screwed up".
What I'm talking about here is you're making sort of an offer, something like:
"Hey, I'll make it up to you. Next time, it's going to be great. Let's meet at the so and so place. It's really nice there. Trust me, you're going to have a great time". Or something like that.
You don't have to use these words necessarily, use your own words.
You can probably come up with something better than that. But basically, you should make sort of a peace offering.
If she's just not going for it, don't dwell on it. You have to suck it up and accept your losses. But hey, it's worth a shot.
It doesn't take that much effort to text this. Even better if you can have a phone call, if she's answering your calls.
This will give you a chance to learn from your experiences and make your next date much better. So yeah, just don't do that thing again.
FAQs
Now, here are some common questions about how to recover from a bad second date:
Depending on what happened during a bad second date, you can either make an apology, make a joke to make light of it and try to move on, or even put it into perspective for her.
There are a number of signs to know if a second date went bad, including your date getting up and walking away or ending the date early.
Another very common sign is if she doesn't reply to your text. Of course, that may be on her. Ghosting is a low class behavior.
It may not be anything you did, but obviously there wasn't a connection there.
For more info on how to do first dates and second dates the right way, check out this post.
There are two scenarios that you’d need to recover from if your second date was a bad one:
❑ Steps to emotionally recover from a bad first date:
❑ Steps to recover from a bad date and get the girl:
Even if this can be really tricky, it may be worth the try.
If you have any questions or comments, leave them below.
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