There used to be a time when we were all not so scared of using the telephone.

Do you remember the days when you used to have your best friend’s phone number memorized? Or how you’d beam with excitement and your tummy would swarm with nervous butterflies when your mom would shout from the downstairs corridor, “Jennifer, there’s someone on the telephone for you.”

Today, I have friends that don’t even know their significant other’s phone number by heart. While they do know their Twitter handle or their Instagram name, that won’t help them one bit if they were to be stranded somewhere, face-to-face with a payphone. They’d only be able to communicate by typing a message in 140 characters, or less.

With the cold weather making us want to hide underneath a blanket (note: if you live in Florida, or somewhere else tropical, that blanket has holes and those holes are nicely filled in with sunshine—so enjoy!), it’s often difficult to muster up the amount of clothing and energy required to leave the heat that radiates from between our couch cushions to attend a first date. And if we do make that first move, we often spend the first couple of “getting to know you” minutes defrosting, or like me on my most recent first date, dealing with an unattractive case of a nonstop running nose.

How about breaking the ice (until summer time can do that for us) with a preliminary get-to-know-you phone call-date before meeting in person?

Do: Phone your new friend during appropriate hours. No one appreciates an energetic “HELLO, I’m Jen!” as their early morning wake-up call at the dreadful hour of 8am, or as a late night booty call at the lazy-eyed hour of 11pm. If you’re going to make the move of dancing your fingers on the keypad, do it at a respectable hour.

Don’t: Stray away from rehearsed “about me” speeches, or a set of designated job-like interview questions. On the phone, you should give off an inherently relaxed tone, as if you were having a conversation with someone in person. Carry a casual and flowing conversation, taking a deep breath during natural pauses and creating an infrastructure that will be easy to build on top of once you meet up in person.

Read the original post: Love At First JDate: Telephone Talk