Dating and other bad habits.

A coffee date isn’t really a date. It’s more like a trial run for a date.

Seriously. Think about it.  You don’t know much about someone (if anything at all) and you’re not sure you’re willing to invest the time, energy, or money into a full length date. The solution? Coffee.

The brave (or crazy) doing the internet dating thing will definitely back me up that coffee is the way to go.  I hear a lot of internet-dating-horror-stories that start with, “I really should have met him for coffee but instead…”  Internet date fail.  Stick with coffee ladies.  And even those of us who think the internet is really best left to porn, online shopping and dating columns (and should not be used to find mates) still use the coffee date as a kind of testing ground.

Someone argued with me once that you can tell a lot about a person by how they drink their coffee. A coffee enthusiast will take it black. A classicist will take it with either cream or with sugar but not both. The cream and sugar combination is for someone who wants to feel like a grown up by drinking a grown up drink but doesn’t actually like the flavor of coffee.  Cappuccinos, lattes, syrup flavors, type of milk–all supposedly reveal subtle complexities about the person.

Nah. That’s a load of bullshit.  All it tells you is how they like their coffee or what mood they happen to be in.

For example: I like lattes. I like lattes with flavor sometimes. I like coffee. I used to take it with cream until I was told to lay off the dairy.  Now I drink it black or make lattes with soy.  This doesn’t reveal anything about my personality except that I like coffee, unless we’re talking about stories that relate to coffee. Once I threw a latte packed with flavor at a woman on the highway who drove like an idiot (clearly one of my finer moments).  This is generally not a good story to tell on a date; even on a coffee date.

But the coffee date is good for breaking the ice even if your date drinks tea.

What the coffee date forces is conversation.  The coffee date is the precursor to drinks and the predecessor to a potentially awkward dinner. At the coffee date, the painfully shy will show just how bashful they are without the aid of alcohol.  The loquacious will prove their ability to keep the conversation flowing.  Coffee lets us know whether or not this person is interesting enough to go on a “real” date with.

And if the coffee date sucks and the conversation is stale?  Well, you can always claim that you could never date a man so high maintenance he drinks a “half-caf breve” anything…