Are Coffee Dates A Huge Turn Off?!

Wow, it was so good meeting you. Oh, it was great talking to you too. Yeah, that was a fun conversation. Maybe we could exchange numbers? We can— Yeah, yeah, I'd love that. I'm actually free on Friday afternoon next week if you wanted to do something then. Maybe get together and get coffee? Coffee? Coffee? Coffee? Coffee? Coffee? Oh yeah, you just order at the counter. I never understood why people don't bring coffee table books to coffee shops. What is— is that, uh, almond milk? A big controversy that's taken over the internet when it comes to early dating rules is that of the coffee date. On Reddit, people are asking, are coffee dates really low effort? And then there are all the TikToks that indicate that if you accept a coffee date, you are essentially positioning yourself as a low-value person. Try telling that to Benedict Ashworth, who just spent half his monthly salary importing expensive beans from Yemen so that he could flirt in a candlelit coffee house. Once upon a time, coffee was a hallmark of luxury and intellectualism, but that's not necessary for this video. These are from Costco. Even on my own channel, when I put up a poll and asked if you would all like to see a video about coffee dates, someone commented, "I think coffee dates are low effort and are truly for broke high schoolers or college kids." When it comes to coffee dates, there are plenty of people who see the benefit. They're low stakes. They're easy to end if things aren't going well, and they are affordable. They are a great way to test chemistry, and if a coffee date goes really well, it can always turn into dinner. Despite this, they get so much pushback online. I wanna get this video started by saying, "I get it." There is nothing more unattractive than someone who has zero plan, puts zero thought into a real date, shows up having put no effort into their own appearance on a date, and just generally has shown no respect for the fact that you have come out to meet them. A date is a vulnerable act to begin with. Meeting up and taking a chance on someone that we have never been with in person before. The least we can do is put in a little effort for each other. But we have to put this in a historical context. Don't worry, I'm not gonna go back to 17th century Europe. But even if we just go back 50 years, People had far more certainty before the formal date ever happened, and that is the crucial distinction. People met through work, friends, school, church, bars, parties, repeated social environments. So by the time someone said, 'Do you want to go to dinner sometime?' they usually had already been flirting, conversation, observation, familiarity, social proof, mutual friends, and a sense of chemistry that was building. Even if you met someone in a bar 20 years ago before the apps existed. You met them, you had a great conversation, and then you decided to do something because you had spent 3 hours talking to them and realizing you liked them. At that point, yes, it might have been weird to say, 'We've been talking for the last 3 hours in this bar, you want to go for coffee next week?' Dinner sounds appropriate. In other words, the screening process happened organically before the official date. But app culture changed that. Now people are talking to multiple people at once, people they've never met, heavily curated versions of people, people who may disappear tomorrow, people who may not even resemble their photos, and people who may not have any genuine intention whatsoever. Which means the first date is often the screening process itself. And in that context, a low-stakes coffee suddenly feels far more rational than it might have in previous generations. But that is not what the internet will have you believe. So let's look at some of the biggest criticisms of people who oppose coffee dates. Criticism 1: High-value women don't accept coffee. A lot of TikTokers and influencers claim that women who accept coffee dates are acting low-value. I do not accept a coffee or a walk as a possible date option, and neither should you. First of all, I'm not a dog that needs to be walked. Second, I have an espresso machine at home. Works fabulous. I used to use the term "high-value behavior" in my work, and then I stopped using it because I just didn't like the way it sounded anymore. But the argument these people make is that a woman who respects herself wouldn't show up to meet someone that isn't paying a lot to spend time with her. And to that I say, you must never have got a coffee in West Hollywood. If our value is so easily lost that it goes away by showing up on a coffee date, there is a fragility to how we see our own value. Your value is not dependent on how much someone is willing to spend on you. That gives other people way too much power, and it also starts off a relationship as a transaction. People are confusing here investment with intention. Expensive does not equal serious. It does not even equal generous automatically. Inexpensive doesn't mean unserious. Yes, effort matters, intentionality matters, thoughtfulness matters, generosity matters, but none of those things are perfectly measured by money. And there's clearly a difference between someone who just says, "Let's grab coffee," and someone who says, "There's a gorgeous café I love near the park. Wanna go Sunday afternoon?" And by the way, even within this logic, the argument starts becoming contradictory. You could literally make the reverse argument and say, "I'm so high-value that I only have time for a coffee with someone before I really know I like them." My point with that, by the way, is not to use that as a serious point. I think dinner can be a great date, but to say that any of these rules that we create about what makes us gain or lose value fall apart under scrutiny. You'll also know that one of the things I advocate for in early dating in general is the 'we'll see' mindset. First, we have to adopt a 'we'll see' mindset. Instead of rushing to label someone as special, or imagining a future together, remind yourself that you are still in the discovery phase. Tell yourself, 'I'm enjoying to getting— getting to know this person, but we'll see.' Don't project all of your hopes and dreams onto that person. Remember, the top job in your life, the role of the partner that you spend your life with, has to be earned. Women, by the way, really benefit from this advice and get a lot of value from it. They find it very useful. It's also useful for men. It's useful for everybody who has a tendency to rush in and over-invest in the early stages. And I think that it's important to allow men to use that advice as well. And if a guy is applying that advice, he might say to himself, you know what, I often overdo it by trying too hard to impress someone on a first date instead of just you know, spending a bit of time with someone, hanging out, and seeing what happens. If a guy is applying that advice in that way, I don't think that they should necessarily be criticized for not investing more by someone who themselves is benefiting from not investing too much. When we talked about this on the Love Life Podcast, there was someone who said, "Men are just rationalizing something they're not prepared to do. There are plenty of men who have invited me to a thoughtful date, like going to my favorite museum and the zoo afterwards." Coffee is just thoughtless, effortless, and lazy. How you do one thing is how you do everything. Keep your standards higher than that, girls. I— that's a lot to me, the idea of a first date where you go to a museum and then the zoo afterwards. What if you don't like the person? You're stuck. That's a hostage situation. Yeah, but what if you're looking at the gorillas? What? The gorillas at the zoo. It's still a long first date to be stuck at the zoo with someone that you don't like, even if there's gorillas. What, you don't like gorillas? If you hate gorillas so much, then what's, what's your favorite animal, tough guy? David I don't hate gorillas. Gorillas are great. I'm just— I'm saying I don't have time right now to answer this question. I get hundreds of questions a week. I can't possibly get to every question. Wait on— wait a minute. I took all of my content, everything I've ever said, every live event, every paid program, every thought I've ever had, every piece of advice on dating, relationships, and confidence, and I put it all into a digital mind. The mind of Matthew AI, a mind that anyone can go to at any time to ask the thing they're dying to ask, the piece of information they need to move forward, whether it's decoding a confusing text from someone, figuring out what the next best move is, knowing what to say in a specific difficult conversation, or how to ask for more commitment. And the best part is people can try it for free at askmh.com right now. So that they can literally get my answer to their biggest love life question in the next 60 seconds. Matt. It can even answer David's monkey question. Matt! Matt! What's your favorite animal? I'll tell you the same thing I tell everyone who asks me that question, David. Go to askmh.com. You can't just tell me if you like— No. Criticism number 2: Investment is disproportionate for women. A lot of women online argue that getting ready for a date involves a long process. Women don't just spend the hour prior to the date getting ready. Many women spend their whole lives having to upkeep their looks, from microneedling sessions to makeup, hair, skincare, nails, outfits, shaving, that scary-looking red light mask you wear before bed. All of it. I do think men do some of these things, you know, we are living in a world of the most metrosexual men that have ever existed. All of that costs money and time, and for women who want to opt out of it, research shows that they are penalized in the workplace and in society in general because women are judged more harshly on on their looks than men are. I am not dismissing the burdens of any of this. And listen, I'm a big advocate for creating the culture you want to have in your dating life. You know this. Most of us go into our lives— if we're not careful, if we haven't decided the culture we want for our lives, we just end up becoming part of the culture of whatever it is we come into contact with. So if it's important to you to never go on a coffee date, you get to choose that reality. But that culture is not consequence-free, and an unfortunate consequence of rejecting coffee dates outright due to the systemic issues stacked against women is that you could be saying no to some really great men. People who are willing to invest as they get to know you. It can be dangerous to conclude that it is a stranger's responsibility to compensate for the broader issues in society. If we only measure seriousness through expensive first dates, we risk filtering out people who are genuinely intentional but simply cautious about investing too much too soon in a modern app-based dating culture. It's also worth making a point here about the sheer cost of dating when it's only felt on one side in terms of the dates themselves and picking up the tab, and how it can actually disqualify many people from dating. If a dinner costs anywhere from $100 to $200 and you have to date a lot of people to find your person. You might be going on 4 dates a month, and the person who's picking up the tab every time, that's $800 a month that they're spending on lots of people who may not be the right person for them. I've seen arguments online from people who say if you're too broke to date, you shouldn't be dating, which is an extraordinarily cruel thing to suggest, that our financial status should preclude us from a life of love. If a man cannot afford dinner for two, he should not be dating. He should be working to make more money, because if he can't afford dinner for two? How is he going to afford a family and support the future kids? Girl, choose wisely. And it's not just women. I've seen older men righteously proclaim that if you can't take someone to dinner, you're not ready for marriage. You shouldn't be allowed in the dating pool. Firstly, this is an insane amount of early judgment to place on someone who has simply invited you for coffee or a low-stakes date. Secondly, whether you're a man or a woman watching this, be incredibly skeptical of anyone you see online who seeks to gatekeep dating. Those people have the potential to either rob you of the right person by giving you filters that are just too hard, or being someone who robs you of your confidence because they make you feel like you're not worthy in the dating pool. Criticism number 3: Coffee dates are boring and business casual and seem like an interview. I do get this, and for sure someone taking you to Starbucks on a first date is like gonna be a turn-off for most people. I get that. I, I, that makes sense to me. I have a mocha frappa bippy boppa with light foam For a Steve! So where do you work? I get it, and there are certainly places that if someone took you to for a date would be an immediate turn-off. Starbucks is probably one of them. Even though I enjoy a Starbucks, it's not a first date location. But someone might take you to a coffee shop that they really enjoy, or that is a personal favorite of theirs, and therefore is intentional. And by the way, this video isn't really about coffee shops shops at all. It's not about coffee dates. It's about the nature of first dates, and it's about realizing that there are many first dates that don't cost a dime that happen to be great first dates. And if we have these rules that say someone has to take me to a table where they spend money on me in order to be a viable candidate, we're missing amazing candidates. Look, people are saying to me all the time right now that dating has become impossible. That they can't even get someone to the point of a date, let alone worry about how the date is going. I don't think that in an age where meeting up in person feels increasingly difficult, the right response to that is to raise the activation energy of a date to dinner or nothing. I think we actually need to make it easier to get on dates with each other where real connection will be built, and I think there is some basic confusion here over what a first date actually is. It is a chance for two people, hopefully in a low-stakes, enjoyable way, to find out if they like each other enough to do it again. In many ways, the second date is more of a date than the first date, because it's the date where you really decided to go on a date. If people took the philosophy that I'm challenging in this video and simply shifted it to the second date instead of the first, I'd actually find it much more reasonable. But for a first date, a coffee date, or any inexpensive date— a walk in the park, uh, sitting on a park bench looking at a river, going for ice cream— is not a statement about anyone's worth, yours or theirs. It is simply two human beings getting together, being in company, and deciding whether there is enough there to continue. And at best, this whole argument is a distraction from what should actually be occupying your focus. Rather than obsessing over the quality of the venue, what is the quality of your date? The person sitting in front of you. What are they like to spend time with? The best dates aren't determined by what you do. They are determined by who you are with. Some of the strongest relationships begin in the smallest simplest moments. Not because someone spent the most money, but because sitting across from that person felt easy. Look, there are couples who have been married for 40 years whose first date started with ice cream and a walk in the park. There are other people who are going through the most brutal breakup or divorce right now whose first date will have been something incredibly expensive and lavish. If what we are looking for is something meaningful and lasting, then what we need to look for is the connection. The activity and the money spent are far less important than that. And to be clear, this is not an advertisement for how amazing coffee dates are. This video is an advertisement for not finding yet one more way to cynically and prematurely disqualify people in a world where connection is hard enough as it is. Leave me a comment below letting me know a favorite first date you have been on, or maybe even a first date you would like to go on if someone invited you. I will be reading the comments, and I will see you in next week's video. Oh, Audrey, just the lady I was looking for. Um, might I interest you in a double espresso on the patio? It's 6:30 PM. I'm getting ready for bed. I'm cozy. Okay, well, I made this whole video to try and secure that date, so It was pointless. Good night.