If the movie “Grease” taught us anything, it’s that summer loving can be a blast. So perhaps it’s no real surprise that, according to Facebook, most users change their status to “single” so they can mingle during the summer.
East Village resident Mandy Proton fondly recalls a summer romance she had when she was 22. Now 35, the blogger says it was great while it lasted, partly because the season lent itself to tons of activities.
“We went to Boston to see concerts on the esplanade, went to Vermont for a long weekend,” she says. “And he taught me how to make a corn dog from scratch! Which I’ve yet to try to make on my own.”
Her warm-weather fling wasn’t without its downsides, though: “It was also the first and last time I tried to have sex on the beach.”
Maria Avgitidis, a matchmaker at New York City-based service Agape Match, says summer can be a perfect time to date. “Summer weather promotes more activities for socializing,” says the 29-year-old Chelsea resident. “Weekends are filled with weddings, barbecues, rooftop cocktail parties. There are more opportunities as a result to meet more ‘friend of a friend’ people and date them.”
But that doesn’t mean the romance will last. Proton says her fling lasted exactly the season — she called it off when she went back to school in the fall. “I have to say it just fizzled,” she recalls. “We were too different and all we had in common was sex and summer fun.”
Arthur Malov, the founder of New York Dating Coach, who teaches men and women how to hone their dating skills, notes that it might be people’s enthusiasm to get out and do things in the summer that leads to these relationships cooling off in the fall.
“You can’t blame the season — if the relationship is good it’s not going to end at the end of summer,” he says. “If the relationship is not good it will probably only last around three months. It seems like the summer’s ending is responsible, but really it’s just [that] we start dating people because we’re excited about going out in the spring.”
How does one turn that hottie in a swimsuit into a genuine soul mate? “Pay attention to your standards rather than just being happy you’ve met someone to go out with,” he suggests.
If nothing else, remember to take your summer fling’s stories with a grain of salt, as you would a beachy margarita.
That will help you avoid getting into the same problem as Long Island City resident Randi Newton. The 35-year-old journalist recalls a summer fling from 2000: “I had a fun summer fling with a guy visiting from Canada. At the time, he seemed so exotic and adventurous and he had a great tan!” she says. “He had a guitar and said he liked to write music in his spare time. At the end of the summer, before he was going back to Canada, he said that our time together had inspired a song. So he played me this song that he said he wrote just for me. I didn’t really like it, his voice wasn’t that great, but it was a nice gesture. Then he left and I never saw him again.”
Romantic story, right? But wait.
“Months and months later,” Newton says, “I’m out with a girlfriend, and I hear a song at a bar, and it’s the song this guy wrote for me. So I start bragging that I knew the guy who wrote it, and my friend says, ‘This is “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton. Did you go out with Eric Clapton?’
“No. No, I did not.”