Should Fishing Always Be the First Date?

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle this question when it first came to me.

I turn 40 this year. And the thought of going through a first date again makes me physically sick to my stomach. Ugh. A first date.

We all remember them. The energy spent wondering if just being ourselves would be enough. The outfit debacle. Do I shave my legs? The full Mariska Hargitay detective deep dive — finding every detail the World Wide Web has to offer on this person.

As I type this, the person I once stalked on Instagram is on the couch in front of me, playing a heated game of Fortnite with our soon-to-be 10-year-old son.

So. There’s that.

I remember our first date for a lot of reasons. It was an Easter Sunday. We went bass fishing.
I had just come out of a divorce, and honestly? I was not in the mood to smile over a spread of ham and deviled eggs while answering *so how are you doing* on repeat. A boat sounded a whole lot better than a buffet.

Here’s what I remember most about that day. My biggest concern going into it wasn’t whether he’d like me. It wasn’t what I was wearing. I genuinely cannot tell you what I wore that day. Most likely at that time in my life, I was probably pretty hungover and smelling like cigarettes. Does he like cigarettes? Not that I smoke, but when I drink the urge for a marlboro always takes over. “We can tackle that later”

What I remember about these butterflies, I was worried about my cast. I just knew this guy was about to judge my double haul. I had just been introduced to fly fishing outside the small creeks of WNC, and I had recently wrapped up a humbling and honestly embarrassing trip to Charleston where I learned, quickly, that roll casting was not going to cut it if I wanted to fish anything larger than a 14- inch trout. I had been practicing my double haul every single day since that trip.

So that Easter Sunday on the water, I was focused. Not on him. Not on whether he liked me. On my cast, and yes whether I looked good doing it. But it had been more of an internal challenge of mine, to not show greenness. Where I lacked confidence before on first dates, I gained in my casting distance and accuracy.

That was until I hooked a popper straight into the pad of my palm.

I ripped it out as fast as it went in, hoping, desperately, that the fishing guide in the other boat didn’t see that. Today, he still won’t tell me if he knew or not.

It was the first time I had ever been on a first date and never once second-guessed whether this person would like me for me. I wasn’t performing a version of myself. I was just… there. Just Fishing. Having a good time with friends. Cracking open a Coors Light at 10am. Flooding the motor of my dads old john boat, because I had never really paid attention to how he operated it.
But looking back, I think I knew that day. He was a keeper, and he wanted to keep me.

Maybe that’s something fishing does for us, if we let it. Maybe it pulls us out of second guessing and drops us into something more honest. Instead of obsessing over the outfit, we’re focused on the cast. Instead of managing first impressions, we’re rigging our own rods. The meaningful things take over — and somehow, we stop performing and start just being.

The real version of you shows up on the water whether you invited them or not. So here’s the question. Should fishing always be the first date?

Because it seems like, for a lot of us, it’s the moment we are most ourselves. Most confident. Most real. No outfit panic. Just you, the water, and whoever is lucky enough to be sharing the water with you.

And if someone’s going to like you — really like you — that’s probably the version they should meet first.