In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, here are five suggestions for successful dating, designed specifically for arts marketers. Follow these tips and the relationships you’re looking for can’t fail to materialize:

1. Look Nice – But Don’t Overdo It

When you’re dating, it’s important to present an attractive appearance that honestly reflects your personality. Arts marketers have a tendency to over-accessorize so you might want to pare down to the essentials. Keep it simple. Try to see yourself through your date’s eyes or get some good advice from a friend. Oh, and that diamond treble clef brooch your grandmother gave you? Leave it at home.

2. Talk Normal

Chances are your date speaks plain old conversational English. Arts marketers speak an artificial language filled with overblown adjectives, indulgent self-flattery and creaky old clichés. There’s a slight chance that a relationship with you will be a roll-in-the-aisles, side-splitting, zany madcap romp or a compelling descent into madness and intrigue set against the backdrop of pre-apocalyptic twenty-first century urban America, but it’s not something you’ll want to project on a date. Just talk like a regular person.

3. Don’t Talk About Yourself

If you want your date to like you, ask questions. Learn about what interests them and focus your conversation on the areas where your interests and their interests overlap. Arts marketers talk exclusively about themselves and the things they think other people should find interesting about them. They almost never ask questions, so they don’t learn about other people’s interests, and they blithely prattle on about how wonderful they are, hoping that by promoting their inherent wonderfulness they’ll make themselves more attractive. Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of this sort of thing, however, can tell you that it’s a lousy dating strategy.

4. Don’t Lecture

A relationship with you may end up being a valuable learning experience, but that’s something you’ll want to avoid telegraphing on a date. Arts marketers have an annoying habit of trying to educate everyone, as if to suggest that a successful relationship with them would be contingent on a certain level of academic achievement. Yes, late nineteenth century Norwegian societal constraints may have made strong women do crazy things, but that’s no subject for a dinner conversation, Hedda. Find out what interests your date and talk about those things instead. Who knows, you might end up learning something useful as well.

5. Ask

If you want to get lucky, you have to ask. Arts marketers do endless promotion but they don’t do sales, so they don’t know how to close the deal. You can spend the whole evening talking about how wonderful you are and then sit back and wait for your date to make the move, but that only works for marketers who are totally super hot. If you’re just reasonably attractive, but smart and worth getting to know, you’re going to need a more proactive, less self-centered approach.

So if your old relationships haven’t been working out so well and you’re looking forward to getting to know somebody new, put on a nice simple outfit, talk like a normal human being, take a sincere interest in others so you can talk about common interests, don’t try to improve people before you get to know them and, when you’ve earned the permission, move in for the kiss.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Love,

Trevor