Blind Date Basics

When someone sets you up with a person on a blind date, it says a lot about what they think of you. Of course, there are many different factors to consider. One is how well the person setting you up knows you. Another is how motivated they are to set you up. A third is how many people they know. When my grandma calls me saying she has met a single girl, you can rest assured that this single girl a) comes from a really great family capable of paying for a really nice wedding reception, and b) she is single. My grandma has no concept of attractiveness or personality compatibility. If the girl wears really nice shoes, my grandma will usually throw in these piece of information as well.

This isn't to say my grandma has never tried to set me up with an attractive girl. She did once. My grandma is just going to look for different qualities in a mate for me than I might look for. It's the same thing with siblings and friends. A person with the best intentions for setting me up may still totally fail at it because they don't know any girls that I would be attracted to.

Still, I can't help but feel disappointed when I meet a girl on a blind date that someone chose for me and the girl isn't attractive. Especially when the person setting me up knows me well. What were the criteria they used to determine this set up? ("Well, they are both single and Tripp is a boy and she is a girl so... BINGO!") I have been set up with girls much older than me, girls taller than me and girls much heavier than me. Most setups just don't make sense on paper, let alone in the real world. So, when someone who knows lots of single girls sets me up with an overweight unattractive shy girl, I know that either this person a) does not think very highly of me, b) thinks very highly of this girl or c) is a lunatic.

I understand that there is a very wide range of subjectivity in attractiveness, humor, ideal weight, and personality connection. But I don't think it is too hard to figure out where my subjective levels of what is acceptable are. And a setup with a girl that is outside of those acceptable ranges is really just a waste of time for both of us.