Laughing at Unfunny Jokes

You might have heard that laughing at every joke your date tells will somehow endear them to you. While busting into laughter at everything they say might produce good results in the short term, you will not like the long-term implications. If they tell bad jokes, you should react with nothing more than a blank stare. Anything else will make them think they should keep telling jokes. They will keep trying to tell jokes, thinking they can do no wrong because you laugh every time. One blank stare will end the bad joke telling forever. Your date will either stop trying to tell jokes or make an effort to improve their lackluster humor.

However, if they tell a good joke, you should give them credit for it. A funny person will feed off your positive reinforcement and keep you rolling in the aisles for as long as you know them. Funny people have a way of wanting all the attention for themselves though. Evaluate every humorous person individually and separate the selfless ones from those that have oversized ego. A relationship will not work if one or more of its sides have a large ego. Egotistical individuals often put their needs over yours and those of the relationship.

In the dating world, you do not want to earn any points with dishonesty. Laughing when you should give them a blank stare isn’t much different than lying to them about other matters. Dishonesty should not rear its ugly head at any point in a relationship. You might try to come up with some justification for why you decided to lie to your date, but you have no real reason to do it. Once dishonesty makes its way into a relationship, it never leaves. It festers and becomes something much worse down the line. Any problem you leave unattended will later explode into a full-blown catastrophe.

Never attach any rules to how you react to members of the opposite sex. If you follow a certain set of rules, your interactions will become stilted and awkward. You need to loosen up. You might think it makes sense to read about how to communicate with certain people. In the end, you have to figure out how to talk with people based on who they are, not on what a rule that says you should laugh at anything that resembles a joke says. You will have a lot more fun if you react the only way that feels right.

Laughter has a way of bringing people together. You remember the people with whom you have shared a genuine laugh. The people you tried to impress with fake laughter fade into the endless abyss of memory. If you want to build long lasting relationships, you should do it with genuine interaction alone. Nothing else will produce the result you desire and the relationships started with artificial will vanish faster than they started. The dating world would improve considerable if we all learned to show our true colors from the beginning.