What Are The Best Questions to Ask on a First Date?

OkCupid discovered the best questions to ask on a first date which can show if she’s willing to sleep with you on the first date, how tolerant she is, if she’s liberal or conservative, and if she has long-term relationship potential.

Asking these questions can give you an idea about the mindset of your date. These are simple and highly effective ways to dig a little deeper than the traditional “What do you do for fun” type questions.

Ask Questions.  Don’t Interrogate.

During a date it’s best to just let the conversation flow. You don’t want to turn the first date into an interrogation or make it feel like a job interview.

If you find yourself struggling, you can fall back on these questions based on a study by OkCupid but ask them in an open-ended way.

OkCupid did their own internal study to answer this question “What questions are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper, unspeakable, issues people actually care about?”  OkCupid wanted to provide “useful” questions to ask on a first date, not ones that were awkward.

Here are the best questions to ask on a first date according to OKCupid followed by the reason why you should ask them.

Question 1: “Do you like the taste of beer?”

Add an an open-ended question before the question above so she can’t say “yes” or “no”: “What’s your drink of choice? Do you like the taste of beer?” 

The Reason: If you want to know if a woman will have sex with you, this is the question you should ask a woman.  Among OkCupid’s casual topics, this question was the single best predictor if a woman has sex on the first date.  Women beer lovers are 60% more likely to be OK with sleeping with someone they’ve just met.

Question 2:“Do you like horror movies?” or “Have you ever traveled around the country alone?” or “Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?”

The reason: These are the three best questions to ask on a first date if you want to know if you both have “long-term potential.”  OkCupid surveyed over 34,000 couples and the three questions above scored the highest in terms of correlating to an actual relationship by those couples.

You should add an open-ended question before asking these questions as well to avoid the woman from responding with a simple “yes” or “no” response.  For example, change “Do you like horror movies?” to “What’s the last good movie you saw in the theater? Do you like horror movies?”

Question 3: “Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?”

The reason: If you want to know if you and your date share the same politics.   OkCupid found that people who prefer “complexity” are more likely to be liberal while people who choose “simplicity” are more likely to be conservative.

Question 4: “Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?”

The reason: If you want to know if your date is religious.  If your date answers ‘no’, meaning she is okay with bad grammar and spelling, the odds of her being at least moderately religious is slightly better than 2:1 according to OkCupid.

Showing she is ok with grammar and spelling possibly shows tolerance.  This is one question you want to know “yes” or “no” to, so go ahead and ask it in this manner.

Final Thoughts

Conversations during a date should flow naturally but there will be times when all of a sudden the conversation stops.

In those cases you should have some questions or topics you can fall back on when necessary.

OkCupid has certainly helped by figuring out, from a statistical perspective, a few questions to ask on a first date.

Although not 100% conclusive, these questions can be a clue to the woman’s mindset and values.

Source: Rudder, Christian. “The Best Questions For A First Date.” OkCupid. April 20, 2011. Web. September 2, 2015