Never say these 7 things on a first date
Whether you've swiped right or simply met someone at a bar, a first date can often be hell.
Putting your best foot forward is important, and being blunt could get anyone booted from a seat at the relationship table from the start.
Some turns of phrase are turn-offs before even the second glass of red wine lubricates what is already a stressful encounter.
To help you avoid a disaster date, here are seven conversations not to have:
'I'm just looking for something fun… unless you change my mind.'
This isn't flirty. It's mixed signalling and, as psychologist Dr Jonathan Redelinghuys explains, it sets the tone for a power imbalance where one person holds back while dangling vague promises.
'Mixed messages early on create anxiety and mistrust,' said Dr Redelinghuys. 'It implies emotional unavailability and a lack of respect for the other person's intentions.'
'My ex used to…' or 'You remind me of my ex.'
A cold shoulder guarantee. Nobody wants to be compared to a former lover.
Leave your ex-anecdotes at the parcel counter and forget to collect it when you go home.
'Mentioning an ex shows emotional residue that hasn't cleared,' said Dr Redelinghuys. 'It immediately positions your date as a comparison, not an individual.'
A study found that ex-talk drastically reduces attraction and perceived emotional availability. Like a Reddit user said: 'He compared me to his ex-twice before the appetisers arrived. I excused myself.'
ALSO READ: Will AI replace your psychologist?
'I looked you up.'
Never, ever admit to CIA-ing the person you're spending time with on a date.
Imagine telling your date that you saw their pics of an office party where they danced on the tables last year.
'Oversharing digital snooping shatters the illusion of organic discovery,' said Dr Redelinghuys. 'There's a fine line between curiosity and control.'
'I really do not like……'
Keep your opinions on sensitive matters to yourself.
This can be something as simple as supporting US President Donald Trump's Afrikaner refugee programme through to animal welfare, women's, or men's rights.
Moreover, hate speech or prejudice that belongs to decades ago is not sexy.
'Expressions of intolerance signal emotional rigidity and poor empathy,' said Dr Redelinghuys. 'You will not get lucky spewing codswallop.'
'So, how much do you earn?'
A Reddit user lamented that 'she asked about my salary right after asking what car I drove. Nope. No thanks.'
Payslips are not love letters, and month-end is not Valentine's Day.
Making a first date transactional, said Dr Redelinghuys, solicits judgment, and concomitantly, he added, 'you can make someone feel that the only value they have is what's in the bank.'
A study by the Personal Relationships Journal found that asking questions about money too soon can lead to personal discomfort and may come across as overly materialistic.
'I've had more than 25 sexual partners.'
So, here's my dirty laundry, you say. There are notches on my bedpost.
There can be nothing worse than sharing a meal when your date pipes up and blurts out the contents of their little black book or, even worse, that they have some kind of unmentionable fetish.
There's a time and place for everything, said Dr Redelinghuys.
'Early sexual disclosure without trust is often received as attention-seeking or emotionally reckless. It can make the other person feel like a statistic rather than a potential partner or just plain scared.'
'I'm just wanting to get married and have kids. Soon'
Before you've had your first kiss or gafoofle, they tell you that there's a plan in motion and a checklist to boot.
On this roadmap, there are kids at this time, a new house at that time, and grandkids further along the way. It's pressure that can make the oversharer seem desperate.
'There's a difference between being goal-driven and appearing desperate,' Dr Redelinghuys explained. 'It can overwhelm your date and create pressure before there's been any connection.'
NOW READ: Quarter Life – your first existential crisis
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The Citizen
18 hours ago
- The Citizen
Never say these 7 things on a first date
Some turns of phrase are turn-offs before even the second glass of red wine lubricates what is already a stressful encounter. Whether you've swiped right or simply met someone at a bar, a first date can often be hell. Putting your best foot forward is important, and being blunt could get anyone booted from a seat at the relationship table from the start. Some turns of phrase are turn-offs before even the second glass of red wine lubricates what is already a stressful encounter. To help you avoid a disaster date, here are seven conversations not to have: 'I'm just looking for something fun… unless you change my mind.' This isn't flirty. It's mixed signalling and, as psychologist Dr Jonathan Redelinghuys explains, it sets the tone for a power imbalance where one person holds back while dangling vague promises. 'Mixed messages early on create anxiety and mistrust,' said Dr Redelinghuys. 'It implies emotional unavailability and a lack of respect for the other person's intentions.' 'My ex used to…' or 'You remind me of my ex.' A cold shoulder guarantee. Nobody wants to be compared to a former lover. Leave your ex-anecdotes at the parcel counter and forget to collect it when you go home. 'Mentioning an ex shows emotional residue that hasn't cleared,' said Dr Redelinghuys. 'It immediately positions your date as a comparison, not an individual.' A study found that ex-talk drastically reduces attraction and perceived emotional availability. Like a Reddit user said: 'He compared me to his ex-twice before the appetisers arrived. I excused myself.' ALSO READ: Will AI replace your psychologist? 'I looked you up.' Never, ever admit to CIA-ing the person you're spending time with on a date. Imagine telling your date that you saw their pics of an office party where they danced on the tables last year. 'Oversharing digital snooping shatters the illusion of organic discovery,' said Dr Redelinghuys. 'There's a fine line between curiosity and control.' 'I really do not like……' Keep your opinions on sensitive matters to yourself. This can be something as simple as supporting US President Donald Trump's Afrikaner refugee programme through to animal welfare, women's, or men's rights. Moreover, hate speech or prejudice that belongs to decades ago is not sexy. 'Expressions of intolerance signal emotional rigidity and poor empathy,' said Dr Redelinghuys. 'You will not get lucky spewing codswallop.' 'So, how much do you earn?' A Reddit user lamented that 'she asked about my salary right after asking what car I drove. Nope. No thanks.' Payslips are not love letters, and month-end is not Valentine's Day. Making a first date transactional, said Dr Redelinghuys, solicits judgment, and concomitantly, he added, 'you can make someone feel that the only value they have is what's in the bank.' A study by the Personal Relationships Journal found that asking questions about money too soon can lead to personal discomfort and may come across as overly materialistic. 'I've had more than 25 sexual partners.' So, here's my dirty laundry, you say. There are notches on my bedpost. There can be nothing worse than sharing a meal when your date pipes up and blurts out the contents of their little black book or, even worse, that they have some kind of unmentionable fetish. There's a time and place for everything, said Dr Redelinghuys. 'Early sexual disclosure without trust is often received as attention-seeking or emotionally reckless. It can make the other person feel like a statistic rather than a potential partner or just plain scared.' 'I'm just wanting to get married and have kids. Soon' Before you've had your first kiss or gafoofle, they tell you that there's a plan in motion and a checklist to boot. On this roadmap, there are kids at this time, a new house at that time, and grandkids further along the way. It's pressure that can make the oversharer seem desperate. 'There's a difference between being goal-driven and appearing desperate,' Dr Redelinghuys explained. 'It can overwhelm your date and create pressure before there's been any connection.' NOW READ: Quarter Life – your first existential crisis
IOL News
13-06-2025
- IOL News
The Original Wound: When the Land Screamed and the Lie Was Born
Gillian Schutte explores the enduring impact of colonialism in South Africa, where the myth of an empty land has perpetuated systemic injustices. Image: IOL The wound has never healed. Because the wound is still being inflicted. Daily. Systemically. Spiritually. It is layered in bureaucratic denial, wrapped in legal delay, and dressed with the poison of myth. A wound so vast and ancient, it swallows generations whole. And it began with a lie — that this land was empty. That lie remains the cornerstone of South Africa's settler-colonial cosmology. The claim that Europeans found uninhabited land or a sparsely populated wilderness is the perversion that justifies every act of theft, every severing of spirit, every white hand gripping a title deed soaked in ancestral blood. Never a misunderstanding, it was a psychological operation. A strategy. A theological inversion. A deliberate severing of people from place so that settlers could root themselves where they never belonged. They arrived — Dutch, German, French Huguenot — not as a people called Afrikaner, but as fragmented emissaries of empire. Over time, forged in the violence of dispossession, they became something else: a racial caste defined by land hunger, myth-making, Calvinist entitlement and a haunting spiritual arrogance. The lands they claimed were not empty. They were alive with cosmologies. The Khoekhoen, the !Xam, and the ǁKhu||ʼein had lived here since before the idea of Europe was ever whispered into being. They walked in sacred relationship with the soil, naming the stars, telling time with fire and birdcall, living in cyclical intimacy with drought and rain. Their rock art was was archive. Their breath gave shape to the world. The other Indigenous nations — amaXhosa, amaMpondo, amaZulu, BaPedi, BaTswana, Vhavenda, BaTsonga — rooted their sovereignty in land, kinship, and memory. The land was home. The land was structure. The land was law. What the colonisers called wilderness was in fact woven knowledge. What they named absence was sacred order. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. 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Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ The Curse of the Empty Land To dispossess is one form of violence. To then say you never belonged is a deeper crime. And this has always been the foundational cruelty: to take the land and declare that those who resisted were squatters in their own cosmos. This is the original wound — not just loss of territory, but loss of a way of being. The shattering of the self. The coloniser did not simply occupy. He re-authored. He renamed. He rerouted ancestral lineages, erased memory, desecrated graves, mocked rituals, silenced languages, and replaced all of it with a violent monologue: God gave this to us. We are the chosen ones. To this day, the wound speaks through the silence around the Khoekhoen and the !Xam. It weeps through unmarked graves, through unpaid labour, through townships built over the bones of the displaced. Spaces the beget mote bones crushed under the weight of dispossession. The myth that this was unoccupied land allowed white South Africans to pretend they were pioneers, not predators. It turned genocide into heritage. It turned theft into entitlement. It turned sacred ground into farmland, fenced off estates and golf courses. It turned presence into ghosthood. The Weaponised Lie of Mfecane There are those who will invoke Mfecane — the great scattering — as proof that African societies were in violent flux when settlers arrived. But the truth is far more complex. Much of what was recorded as tribal skirmish and internecine slaughter was seeded by colonial manipulation, gun-running, slave raiding, and territorial provocation. The settler narrative of African barbarism is projection — a mirror turned outward. Where colonisers found complex political life, they planted chaos. Where there were alliances, they drew borders. Where there was peace, they sowed fear. The myth of the savage justified the civiliser. The scorched earth tactics that razed Indigenous economies, slaughtered livestock, destroyed food systems, and led to the starvation of entire peoples were not the consequence of African violence, but the strategy of white conquest. The British, the Boers — both engaged in calculated devastation. The heads of kings were taken as trophies. Cattle seized. Children abducted. Dignity obliterated. And to this day, the land carries that burn mark. A Trauma Soaked Into the Soul The wound is not historical. It is haemorrhaging now. It pulses in the psyche of Black South Africans, in the grief of generations uprooted, in the rage of communities forced to beg for scraps of what was once sacred inheritance. The wound is spiritual. It is the feeling of ancestral silence. It is the scream beneath the skin of a dispossessed people. It is the splitting of self from land, self from ceremony, self from self. Children born into this wound carry its pain unconsciously. It whispers to them that they are unworthy, stateless, transient, voiceless. It creates an internal war — and this war manifests as interpersonal violence, intergenerational trauma, cultural amnesia, fractured identity, and sometimes, self-hatred. When land is stolen, so is coherence. To be cut off from ancestral ground is to be severed from the spiritual umbilicus of time. Reparations Will Never Be Enough Reparations are necessary. Restitution is long overdue. Land must be returned. But what reparation can name up to the magnitude of this genocide? What payment unburdens the soul of the!Xam? What currency returns a people to their graves, their language, their seasons? What treaty can unmake the silence? This is not a call for reform. This is a call for reversal. The entire power structure imposed by settler rule must fall. Because white rule continues, in courts, in banks, in the economy, in the legal fictions that govern land access, in gated communities that exist atop massacre sites. The original dispossessors hold the keys still. They live in the houses built from bones. They sip wine in valleys whose names they cannot pronounce. They hoard the memory. They police the language. They decide the pace of reconciliation while sitting atop its spoils. This is not democracy. This is the management of a wound by those who inflicted it. The Land Is the Memory Reclaiming land is not only about territory. It is about memory. It is about voice. It is about the restoration of a people's way of being in the world — the right to exist fully in relation to place, spirit, and ancestry. This is why the land issue cannot be reduced to reformist policy. It is cosmic. It is ancestral. It is revolutionary. The memory of the land must be ceased back. Not leased, not negotiated — ceased back into the hands of those it birthed, fed, and buried. There can be no freedom while white hands hold the soil. There can be no peace while the original nations — Khoekhoen, !Xam, ǁKhu||ʼein, amaXhosa, amaZulu, and others — remain spectral in their own territories. The land must breathe again in its rightful names. The ceremonies must return. The ancestors must be welcomed home. The resources must be owned and development must be rooted in African Knowledge and on African terms. Afrofuturism is not going back to animism. It is the merging of African cosmologies into a type of Wakandian advancement. Outside of the clutches of European restrictive enlightenment diktats. The wound must be addressed from within the psyche, not just the courts. It must be acknowledged in the language of spirit. It must be cleansed in the fire of truth. The Land Remembers The land is not mute. It remembers. The trees remember. They whisper these truths. The rivers remember. They sing They sing past joys. The earth, still stained with the blood of ancestors, remembers. It remembers the footprints of the ǁKhu||ʼein. The kraals of the Khoekhoen. The songs of the amaXhosa. The chants of resistance. The rainmaking. The funerals. The betrayal. The theft. The land remembers what the settlers erased. And it waits. Until that lie — the empty land lie — is publicly buried, until the sacred is returned to those from whom it was stolen, until the ruling order crumbles and a new breath rises from ancestral memory, the wound will not heal. The land cries out for truth. Let the primordial scream be heard. About the Author Long before she married her Xhosa life partner, Sipho Singiswa, Gillian Schutte was a fierce critic of whiteness — not as colour, but as structure. When she entered Sipho's family, she was cut from the Schutte genealogy and told she was never born. She accepted that erasure as a political and spiritual severance. She writes from this rupture — exposing settler lies, reclaiming memory, and refusing complicity. This essay is part of that refusal. Her film, Chasing the Ancestors, made in 2005, is a literal road trip taken by Gillian, Sipho and 5 year old Kai in search of the intersections between her Dutch and Sipho's Xhosa history in the Eastern Cape and Karoo in the 1700s.
IOL News
06-06-2025
- IOL News
The Hangout: A (caring) bridge over troubled water
Today could be one of my favourite days of the year, right next to the International Day of Happiness, which is celebrated throughout the world on 20 March- but was actually established by the UN General Assembly on 28 June 2012. The International Day of Happiness aims to help people around the world realise the importance of happiness in their lives. I mean, we all know it's important, but sometimes it just feels a little harder to find- or sometimes even impossible. Sigh. It's the little things, though, and that's why today is so important too. It's World Caring Day today, and it was only made official in 2022. I know I harp on about spreading kindness pretty often, but I think it's so important- it can change lives like a domino effect. I also think that, with the amount of stress and struggle out there right now, we forget to be a bit more understanding and a little more compassionate. And honestly, that's totally understandable if you've just hit seven ginormous potholes in 300 metres, your 19th friend has emigrated, your fridge has just packed up, and your boss can't pay you on time. Stuff is hard. And it's getting harder. But that smile you share with a stranger in the grocery store, or that half a sandwich you give to the guy at the traffic light or stop street- it helps. It all helps. And we have to try to remember that, no matter what we're going through, someone else out there is going through worse. That little bit of love you give today might just come back to you like a boomerang tomorrow. I don't think you should ever give just to get something in return- but I'm pretty sure that's how karma works, isn't it? So- World Caring Day! What are you going to do today to celebrate it? I think it should be as important as any other big day. A public holiday even (haha kidding)! Do something, no matter how big or small, to brighten your own life- or someone else's. Be kind to yourself. Show yourself a little love. Or treat someone to a surprise, like it's Easter or Valentine's Day. We all try to do our 67 minutes for Mandela Day, so why not this too? I'm sure Madiba would be pretty happy to know there are even more days when people lend a helping hand and show a little extra kindness. World Caring Day traces its roots back to 7 June 1997, inspired by the brief but meaningful nine-day life of baby Brighid. Born prematurely, Brighid's journey sparked something powerful- Sona Mehring, a software engineer and family friend, created the very first CaringBridge website to keep loved ones informed and connected. Through this site, Brighid's family received not only updates but also an outpouring of love, support, and comfort when they needed it most. It was like an online support group- at a time when social media didn't even exist yet! What started as a simple act of care quickly grew into something much bigger- a global community called CaringBridge. This non-profit is all about bringing families and friends together during life's toughest health journeys, offering a space filled with love, comfort, and support. Since 2021, around 45 million people from across the globe have visited CaringBridge. Every hour, more than 1,900 heartfelt messages of hope and encouragement are shared with loved ones through the site. Maybe you're also in need of a little care, inspiration, or advice right now- so head over to Go for that meal you can't really afford. Tell the cashier she looks lovely today. Take yourself to the movies and switch off from all your problems for an hour or two. Or take a walk in the park with your phone on silent. Be kind to yourself and to others today- and maybe that kindness will catch on and carry over into tomorrow, and the next day too. Now, I'm already getting excited for National Hug & High Five Day, which is celebrated in the U.S. on 12 September… but I'll be celebrating it here anyway. Who's with me? Can I just say yay.
