If you don’t feel like asking these kinds of questions, try my favorite approach to avoiding small talk. Enter the date in media res. That’s Latin for “in the middle of things.” It’s a literary term that describes a story opening somewhere in the middle of the action, rather than at the beginning. (You can think of it as “coming in hot.”) When you walk into a date, instead of starting with the awkward “So, how’s your day going?” or “Where do you live?” jump right into the middle of things: “You’ll never guess what happened on my way over here!” or “I just got off the phone with my sister, and
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