Remember back in college when you were taking a bunch of classes for your major, and during the course of the semester all of the information would begin to mesh together and overwhelm your fragile college brain? Sure we all had friends or acquaintances who were conscientious students and constantly reviewed all of the material for their classes so they could keep it all neatly compartmentalized in their heads, but for many people that is the college ideal not the reality. So what did the rest of us less diligent students do to combat our apathy and earn respectable or, at the very least, passing grades: We crammed. The night before a big exam we stayed up all night trying to jam as much information on a particular subject into our brains as was humanly possible in an attempt to overcome the fact that we had neglected to truly learn the material.

The other night, while I was driving to grab drinks with a woman I had met on JDate, I realized that I was drawing a blank of much of the information she had told me about herself during the course of our previous email correspondence. Part of the problem was that information from my other conversations with women on JDate had blended together in my head with this one and unfortunately, as I drove to meet her, I could no longer properly discern which facts, characteristics and stories were uniquely hers. Since I have been active on JDate for a while now I have gone out on enough first dates to not panic in the face of such self-inflicted adversity, and realized that I would be fine if I just went with the natural flow of conversation, and didn’t ask too many questions I should probably already know the answer to.

The date ended up going well, and thankfully I was able to avoid repeating any questions or telling any stories that had already come up in our emailing. On my way home after dropping her off I was honestly a little bothered by the fact that I couldn’t remember many facts from our previous email conversation, and that I was confusing it with others I was currently having with other women on JDate. Even though I don’t believe that this situation means I’m a bad person I have been trying to think of a way to avoid this type of situation from reoccurring in the future, and after pondering that question for the rest of the night I ended up thinking of only one viable solution, which did take me back to my college days, that I should skim through recent emails (or cram) before I go out on dates in the future.