Dating Dish is a monthly feature that brings you hot dating tips and sassy how to-s to keep your dating life sexy.

I personally find self promotion to be one of the most nerve-wracking, awkward tasks in life – especially when I’m trying to do it in such a way that I don’t come across as a pompous, self-involved jerk. And as an author trying to make a living off of shilling my opinions and advice, I have to do a lot of said promotion. It can be fun once I get into a conversation about something I’m passionate about (most recently, handling awkward situations, since that’s the topic of my new book), but mostly, I find it rather terrifying. And when I get scared or nervous, it takes a concerted effort not to do something totally weird (like laugh too hard and long at the wrong thing, forget my own name, forget the name of the person I’m talking to, say something totally unrelated to the current conversation, etc.)

Unfortunately, self promotion is also a completely necessary part of dating, making dating a cluster of nerve-wracking awkwardness.

After all, under the guise of enjoying a drink together, we’re actually feverishly judging the person we’re with to see if we want to spend a significant amount of future time with them, but since we only have a limited amount of time to judge them, we look for any little signal that indicates whether or not they’re a serial killer, whether or not their set of issues will mesh well with our set of issues, whether or not they’ll be OK with our obsession with so-bad-they’re-awesome creature-features and whether or not they ultimately want to retire at age 35 in Maui like we do. At the same time we’re scrutinizing them, they’re scanning us for any indication that we’re normal, kind and fun, unlike like their ex, who stomped on their heart and left it bleeding in the street. On top of all of that, we’re both trying to put our best and most interesting “I’m a really cool person you’ll want to get to know” face forward so that they’ll like us — without looking like pompous, self-involved jerks.

Being judged, whether it be in dating, through our creations or in life, sucks. It’s terrifying. We’re on guard because we don’t know what the other person’s deal-breakers are and we don’t want to set off any alarms, and because whether or not we’ve decided we like them, we (and they) want the option to decide — not to have that decision made for us.  And on top of all of that is the fear if we end up liking them, then they have the ability to hurt us by not liking us back. So we protect ourselves by looking for any and all indications that they’re NOT the person for us and making snap judgements (based in fear) that are quick and sometimes unfair, just as the judgements they place on us are quick and unfair. Yay for self-preservation!

Through all of the fear, however, is the part where we really just want to be liked for who we are at our cores — their (and our) deal-breakers be damned. Pandering to what we think they’ll like and acting accordingly rarely ends well, because then we’re not being ourselves. And if we’re not ourselves, what’s the point? We may not be able to control their judgy-wudgy habits, but we *can* control our fear. If we roll into a date (or into an interview or a bookstore to talk about ourselves, gulp) purely to enjoy (and not freak out about) getting to know someone new (and sharing who we are), chances are good that they’ll feel that openness and lack of judgement and perhaps relax a little. Maybe even enough to let us see the real them.  : )

Samantha Scholfield

Samantha Scholfield writes the monthly blog feature Dating Dish and is a dating coach, freelance writer and the “considerably hipper” than The Rules author of the popular dating guide, "Screw Cupid: The Sassy Girl’s Guide to Picking Up Hot Guys". Her articles regularly appear on Yahoo.com, her advice has appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post and Seventeen. Her second book, about awkward situations in love and life, "Awkward: What to Do When Life Makes You Cringe", was released on August 9, 2011. She’d love to hear from you at sam@samanthascholfield.com | www.samanthascholfield.com