I like alpha male strategies. But I don’t agree on this. I definitely kiss on the first date and not at the end but somewhere in the middle. If I get a negative response in the middle I will look for an open door to cut the date off early. If I get a positive response then I will hold hands for the rest of the date and then do the kiss close of course.
I like the idea of getting a kiss done somewhere in the middle. It's a real tough situation if you're nearing the natural end of a date, and the first date lay doesn't seem probable, and there's been no kiss. There's a lot of pressure on that final moment. A kiss somewhere in the middle of the date averts that.
I don’t expect sex till date number three but kiss on date number one is a must for me.
As a late 30s guy who has been in the dating environment for ~20 years, I'm sensing this has changed over time. In the first half of the 2000s, it seemed like moving at a slower speed was more acceptable than today. I think a lot of that had to do with fewer participants in online dating then. When online dating websites got big, women could see their demand. Their inboxes were flooded on OkCupid, POF, Match, etc. Then, Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge came about a few years after the smartphone launched, and it put the website era on steroids. Female app queues got bigger than the message inbox flooding that occurred in the website era. Women's inboxes were also flooded on apps too. Also, more women have been app users than there were website users circa 2010. Due to more options, we as men became more replaceable to women, so the pressure to get the bang on the first date. Female expectations for the first date went sky high. If a woman doesn't feel all the rainbows and butterflies in the world on the first date, she ghosts. A first date that would have been considered a good first date with a kissing in 2005 and get a second date probably would result in a ghosting in the late 2010s/2020. This also impacts the environment for people that meet outside of technologically assisted means.
I think the way in which the date was sourced can affect the speed of movement. App sourced dates should be a bang on first date. In theory, women should treat men that have the guts to cold approach them in person better than swipe monkeys, but they only marginally do so. The idea behind cold approach is to get the in-person experience right away and streamline operations, reducing flaky behavior. Doesn't always work out that way. I've never had a viable social circle for getting dates. Only a few dates in my lifetime have been sourced from social circle, and they were weak social circle connections. I could see not pushing for sex as hard on a social circle sourced date because there might be blowback from the social circle.
The removal from friends/acquaintances from the dating process has encouraged worse behavior from both sexes. If a woman ghosts a guy after an app sourced first date in which she received free drinks, her social circle is not informed of this behavior. She faces no social consequences for her bad behavior. A similar thing happens with cold approaching too. The fewer pre-existing outside world connections exist, the more it incentives there are for each sex to exhibit their basest behavior and extract value faster. For men, we must extract sex faster. For women, they must get more external validation and freebies from dating faster.
First date kissing has been essential for at least 2 decades, but I wonder if the environment is making first date sex a necessity now, sort of to encourage women to invest in the interaction.
