When it comes to deciding on a place to eat with your partner, there are two types of people: The suggester — who “doesn’t care where we eat, can you just pick one?” — and the person who doesn’t know what they want to eat, but says no to every suggestion. As the cis, heterosexual stereotype goes, the former is the boyfriend and the latter is the girlfriend (I’ve actually found this to be the opposite, but society loves neat gender boxes, so here we are). This restaurant indecision is notorious for both ruining a nice night out, and, allegedly, destroying relationships. That is, unless you figure out how to hack it.
For those whose coding skills aren’t refined enough to build a restaurant-deciding computer program for their girlfriends (like this guy), the men of Reddit have designed some systems to help. The most popular suggestion involves making your girlfriend guess where you’re taking her — apparently, she’ll say where she really wants to go, and then you take her there. Let’s do a little example:
Partner A: Baby! Guess where I’m taking you for dinner tonight?
Partner B: Ooh, T-Bell!
Partner A: EXACTLY.
Another, popular hack is what redditor heythisispaul refers to as “The 5-2-1 System,” which, he says “solves so many indecision-related issues.” As he describes it, the first person (in this scenario, the girlfriend) chooses five places they’d like to go for dinner. Out of those five, the second person chooses two — the first person then makes the final decision out of those two. For complete fairness, the roles should be switched each time.
“I’ve discovered what she’s actually wanting is for me to just make a decision, and doesn’t want to risk picking a place I don’t want,” said Cole20200, who gives his partner three options instead of five. “Everyone wins, because I’ll only list where I’d want to go, she feels good by having an input and we both save a lot of grump over indecision.”
One, maybe more common, hack involves telling your partner what you don’t want to eat, enabling you to rule out certain options before fighting over the final choices. Or, like Manofthedecade and his wife, you could simply decide in under 15 minutes — as punishment for indecision, they have to eat at Applebee’s. He calls it the “nuclear option.”
Well, there you have it — a handful of solutions to save your relationship. Now, I’m off to say no to all of the five meals my boyfriend has suggested for dinner.
Brit Dawson
Brit Dawson is a London-based journalist who mostly writes about sex, women's rights and sex work. She is also the staff writer at Dazed.
