Is Weed the New First Date Topic?
4 Weedy Conversation Starters and New York City’s New Signature Scent
There’s a change in the New York air. It lingers around the streets like the rats scurrying for food to fatten their chilling bodies. You can’t always see it, but smell it, you can. For the first time, since New York’s first trash day, the city has a new signature scent. One that has Le Labo running for its money. The new queen of the streets…. marijuana.
Take it from your local grower selling flowers on a wooden folding table in your local community park. The legalization of the green stuff in New York City is underway. Since its decriminalization last year, weed has budded across the city as quickly as it burns. Open discussions are spurting from its leaves, seeping into casual conversations with strangers.
The local grocer, the corner bodega, the not-so-subtle smoke shop down the street, the vintage shop owner, and now, dates. Cannabis stems are growing beyond the secret stash into our dating lives. Like drinking and cigarettes, weed is a part of the dating selection process. Online daters are embracing decriminalization, stating they partake in an occasional or daily sesh. Seeing that cannabis leaf on a dating profile is now as common as your neighborhood, Blank Street Coffee. A new prompt that could make or break a match, depending on your preferences.
Similar to the disclosure of cigarettes or alcohol consumption, sharing your participation or non-participation in smoking weed is inevitable. Weed is a part of many daters’ lives. Dating someone with similar recreational activities is a growing consideration.
With growing interests, should weed be a new first-date topic?
From experience, discussing weed on a first date has been a helpful tool in gauging initial compatibility. Without being too blunt (no pun intended), simply discussing the topic in a way of discussing one’s interests brings the subject up for discussion. Nowadays, one can tell by a dating profile if the subject will be openly accepted. In the event the leaf hasn’t fallen on their profile, telling your date about the edible you ate before you went out dancing last weekend is a little like Russian Roulette, but decriminalized.
Here are four weedy starting points to help spark the conversation without being too blunt:
Share a recent weed experience with your friends or when you were solo. (Ie. When they ask how your weekend was or how your last vacation was.)
Bring up the topic of legalization in your state.
Smell a whiff of the green stuff? Comment on it and see where the smoke takes you.
Not a drinker, but a smoker? Share your toking ways when they ask what drinks you like or if you drink socially.
Yet to encounter a date who runs after one whiff of the stuff, talking about weed on a first date potentially brings two people closer. Unlike drinking and cigarettes, weed is more personal. It’s a unique view of our lives behind the first date veil. Talking about marijuana on a first date is only positive, including the times a date doesn’t share the budding interest. With mystical dispensaries waiting for the magic license to enter reality, there isn’t much room for ganja judgment in New York City or wherever it’s being legalized. If they don’t agree with the consumption of the plant, then it could just be a matter of compatibility. However, everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and not seeing eye to eye on a subject can weed out the not-meant-to-be in the first round.
Even if you don’t smoke or eat the stuff, the chance of smelling New York’s signature scent on the walk back from the bar is as high as the fire escape dweller. Sharing second-hand smoke can launch the conversation into the air. Knowing you both don’t smoke or eat edibles is just as important as learning as you both do. Are you sharing a drink, a cigarette, a cup of tea, or a blunt?
Finding all this hard to believe? Stunting the growth of cannabis in New York City is unlikely. And first dates are only the beginning of the relationship between weed and dating. Marijuana-focused dating apps and smoke dates are slowly entering the discussion, but I’ll leave that for another sesh…
+21 & up… smoke responsibility
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