Should You Flake on Her First? Well, There Are 5 Pros and 3 Cons

It's an old tactic, but you may not have tried it. Should you flake on your date first… before she flakes on you? There are 5 good reasons to… yet 3 cons to keep in mind.

There's an old flake-reduction tactic I first learned about 14 years ago.

The tactic is simple: you flake on her first.

This guy who told me about it mentioned he'd flaked first on his last six dates. Then he rescheduled his meets with them. Each of the six jumped into bed with him on Date #1. None of his dates flaked on him back.

He was still testing it out, he said, and couldn't confirm it was an always-reliable technique... but the early signs looked promising.

I filed that away mentally as an interesting anecdote, but not something I was bold enough to try at the time. At the time, I was only just starting out. I still needed to worry about getting dates in the first place... I was not in a place to start flaking on those dates.

1.5 years and a fair bit of romantic progress later, I had a date with a very attractive girl. However, I also had a lot of things going on. And I forgot the date. I was at a trendy upscale nightclub with a friend, and in the midst of talking to new girls, forgot I had one I was supposed to meet up with that night already.

Well, my date messaged. I saw the message, realized I'd forgotten the date, and told her I wasn't coming. Then she called. I had to awkwardly apologize and tell her I'd forgotten I'd promised my friend we'd hang out.

"So... you're not coming?" she asked again.

"Yeah... I'm sorry, I can't tonight," I said.

"... okay," she said.

I apologized again, and hung up. I felt really bad.

The next day I texted her, apologized again, and offered to reschedule. She accepted.

A few days later I met up with her. She was more or less ready to go already when I arrived. We had a few drinks at the bar, she was super flirtatious, then I pulled her. Two hours into the date I shagged her. We went a few rounds, and she was super sweet to me after.

I was... surprised how it played out, to say the least. "I thought she'd want nothing to do with me after I forgot our date," I thought.

Then I remembered that instructor's experiments 1.5 years earlier. 'Flake on her first' had worked for me, just as it had for him. And I definitely wasn't advanced at that point yet, either.

Maybe it wasn't such a challenging tactic to pull off, after all.