- Share This Post
- submit
- 5
-
Sparkle (0)
Someone told me once that a good place to meet single men is at grocery stores on a Monday night. Apparently men don’t like to take time out of their weekend schedules to buy food, and the crowds tend to be smaller early in the week as well. The next time I went grocery shopping on a Monday night I paid attention, and, well, this person was right. There were solo men everywhere, checking out the produce and pushing their metal carts around. But...(there’s always a “but”).
The problem is, just how easy is it to strike up a conversation with someone while grocery shopping? The answer: not easy. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (a friend of mine met her now-husband at Wal-Mart), but I think it’s pretty rare to meet someone in this type of situation as opposed to other places. Just because men happen to congregate at a specific location doesn’t mean it’s easy to talk to them.
Certain situations are more conducive to random conversations than others, and grocery shopping isn’t one of them. Being approached while looking at cereal or choosing between different types of frozen vegetables just seems more...obvious. People generally don’t linger in grocery stores, so when their progress is halted, even temporarily, the act tends to stand out.
Another place where it’s possible to see people but generally you don’t talk to them? Public transportation. I ride the DC Metro pretty regularly, and the riders tend to be a pretty quiet bunch. It’s rare for a stranger to randomly start talking to you. It’s not that I never see any hotties standing just a few short feet away -- we just don’t speak (plus, other people standing around would totally be eavesdropping on our conversation).
This may seem obvious, but one of the biggest hurdles I’ve had to overcome (and one that I’m still working on) is going out and doing new things even though I feel tired or unmotivated. Here’s a good example: even though I live right outside of Washington, DC and go there five days a week for work, I rarely hang out in the city after work unless I’m going somewhere directly from work, like a happy hour. It’s pretty rare for me to go home and then come back a few hours later.
Since there are several places in my immediate neighborhood where I enjoy hanging out, it’s a lot easier (and faster) for me to get home afterward. But if I go out in DC, I have to wait for the Metro, which (depending on the time of night) has sometimes taken up to 20 minutes for the train to arrive. Then, since I live a mile from my closest Metro station, I either have to walk that mile home or pay to take a cab (which I hardly ever do, but it’s an option).
Now, I’m not complaining. I made the choice to live in Alexandria rather than DC, and there are pros and cons to both locations. It’s just that, taking all these factors into consideration (especially this past Friday night when we were experiencing some of the coldest temperatures we’ve had so far this winter), I was feeling very unmotivated to leave my nice, warm, cozy apartment. But then I thought back to the previous weekend, where I was having the same doubts and ended up going out anyway -- and I had a great time. I was thisclose on Friday to canceling my plans and foregoing the trek to Georgetown, but I decided against it. And once again, I had a great time and was glad I went.
Although most people I’ve talked to say they would prefer to meet someone in real-life (as opposed to online dating), for a lot of us it’s harder to go about it that way. Unless you’re going out and doing things in public on a regular basis, or your line of work puts you in contact with a wide variety of people, you’re just not going to have as many options.
People say that you should do what you love and you’ll have a higher likelihood of meeting someone with similar interests. I agree with that, and it’s also a good way to challenge yourself to check out new things -- like a new sport, or learning a new skill, or something cultural like visiting a museum, or an
