Creator @madibuteyn opens her Instagram reel with a line of on screen text, “when eavesdropping pays off,” and a caption that reads “take notes boys” with a #dating hashtag. The clip runs about 24 seconds. She sits at a table in a bright room with her sunglasses pushed up on her head and a pen in her hand, and she talks straight to the camera while captions appear on screen a few words at a time.
Her setup is simple. Leaning on a white table with an open notebook at the bottom of the frame, she starts with a caption that begins “when girls are in public together, they” and then says “these girls were chatting behind me today.” One of them, she says, “goes” into something about dating that she wanted to hear again. The version she shares has two halves. First comes a sentence that begins “don’t date me to see,” the rest of which the captions only partly show. Then comes the line she wants men to copy down.
The line, as it appears in her captions, is “Date me because you know where you’re going, and you see me going there with you.” She says it with a wide eyed look into the lens, then reacts to how good it sounds with a line that includes a profanity, which is not quoted here. She says she literally turned around and asked the woman to say it again so she could write it down.
The line separates two reasons to date someone. One is curiosity about where things might end up. The other is already having a direction and wanting a particular person to be part of it. For a reader heading into a date, that turns into a few concrete habits. Know your own answer to the question “where am I going” before you ask someone to come along, and be ready to say it in plain words. Show it through what you do, since the line asks the other person to “see” you going there, which means plans, follow through and consistency rather than a promise. And invite the other person into that direction instead of using the early dates to find out whether one will appear. If a partner nods along, that is information. If the answer is vague, that is information too.
