Not everybody who comes through a job interview well will turn out to be a good employee — and I am talking about dates.
Look, most of the research I know shows that the job interview is about the worst selection instrument in the world.
In the same breath: a first date is simply a cumbersome and manifestly inefficient way of working out what the person sitting opposite you is actually like.
I have written about this before, but just as a job interview mainly measures your ability to impress in a job interview, a date mainly measures your ability to conduct a date, and not a great deal beyond that.
Why does that happen? Simply because human beings are insanely complex, and most of the interesting sides of them are hidden and invisible.
And the specific trouble with a first date is that it is an environment with no load on it. Nothing is at stake, nothing has gone wrong, nobody is tired, nobody is disappointed, and no decision has to be made jointly. Almost everything you would actually want to know about a person concerns how they behave when one of those conditions fails — and a first date is carefully constructed so that none of them do.
Anybody who thinks their marvellous intuition will save them should go and live in a hut in the countryside and stop interfering with grown-ups trying to build a love life.
Bottom line: stop trying to be precise about the thing that cannot be made precise. Fewer conclusions, more occasions.
And lest you suspect this of being sour grapes — I am a person who does very well at first dates. I am genuinely sawing off the branch I am sitting on.