Until fairly recently, I thought I could pick and choose which parts of FDS I wanted to follow, because although I strongly agree with the premise and most of the strategies/advice, I thought a few didn’t fit in with me personally.

However, recently I have been talking more with a friend who is also in FDS, and with her encouragement I embraced the remaining few elements. Specifically 1. “who pays for dates”, 2. “don’t do low quality dates” (previously I thought coffee etc was okay), and 3. “don’t focus on one guy at a time in early stages” aspects.

I do think this helped with vetting, especially with my ability to more objectively evaluate who is putting in effort and who is not.

By having multiple people I’m talking to at a time, I could clearly distinguish between one guy who was all “I’d be down to hang out” “let me know what you want to do” and another guy “do you enjoy Italian restaurants?” “I’d love to take you out to dinner” “I’ve made us a reservation at x time”. The difference in effort was night and day, and if I were only talking to the first guy, it wouldn’t have been as blindingly obvious to me that he’s not worth it.

When I went on dates with a guy who offered to pay, he was also better in other ways like holding doors, taking initiative to make dates special by suggesting things I would enjoy based on what he knows about me, showing genuine interest in my life, and not even asking to “come over” within the first few dates. I’m not sure if all of those good things were a random coincidence, but I am now on the page that him paying for the date and suggesting better date venues are clear signs of interest and possibly an indicator of wanting a LTR commitment.

I know this post is only reiterating some of our well known principles, so this is not groundbreaking for many of you. I’m aiming this post at others who maybe felt like I did— I earn enough money to split the bill and I am staunchly a feminist, so I felt resistant to this at first. I thought it was too hard to split my attention between multiple guys, but it wasn’t as bad when I took things slowly and just blocked the ones who weren’t putting in enough effort. It was definitely beneficial to follow these guidelines!! I hope if there are others on the sub in similar positions that y’all might reconsider like I did. It really helped!