Dating Relationship Expert Advice To Meet More People: Join a Book Reading Group

There are book clubs galore and even literary societies.  In the opening scenes of some of the most wonderful Miss Marple movies from Hollywood, our British detective Jane is part of an amateur playreading group.  This was all in the era of when television only had a few channels and the programming was exclusively at night time during the “prime time” viewing hours.  In the movie, the local church vicar had the best blood curdling being murdered scream.

Internet Dating and Social Networking site can serve as marvelous vehicles to connect singles rapidly and casually.  However, you will need eventually to meet in person.

Nothing beats meeting people casually and socially for a slightly extended period of time, say a few hours, with mutual friends or over a shared common interest.

A play reading can serve as a marvelous social convention for amateur theatrics at minimal expense.  Often an easier sell socially and for building the audience as well as the participants list is to take a fun and engaging fictional work and read it aloud as a group.

If you already belong to a book club, suggest to the members that once or twice a year you all do a book reading dramatic reading or enactment of some of the content. Avoid letting it become a massive time commitment of selling tickets and staging it with a lot of expense. The point is to have fun and do some more dramatic readings of books or segments thereof and extend the relationships in the club.

Thriller, suspense, and murder mysteries often serve this purpose the best because they can appeal quite well both to a male reading audience as they do to a female reading audience.  For social as well as casual potentially romantic socializing, ensuring that there is at least a bit of gender parity in the audience and the reading crowd who shows up, steer clear from books which are exclusively action oriented or too specifically fall into the romance novel category.

Whatever your community group or association is, start polling your cohorts as to books they are reading or authors they have recently read and whose storytelling style they enjoy.  Which books are they secretively passing around the group to share so that they have more people they can dish about the book and their new favorite author with?

Now to truly leverage your time, select an author who has written several books or where there is perhaps a book series already published.  Quite often, the first 1 or 2 dramatic (everyone gets to share their ham acting side!) readings will have a small turnout of only a few people.  However, if you schedule this on a regular basis and perhaps tie it into a season, after a few readings, the word-of-mouth will spread and will result in increased attendance typically at the third time there is a reading. You still want to keep attendance to manageable size. The point is to be able to mingle with people, not become an actress.

For instance, seasonality. Jewish singles might choose to do a reading casually as part of their book reading club in the 2 months prior to the High Holy days, building up a group, and ending the meetings with the celebration of the special Fall holy days.

Catholics might embrace a special reading series during Lent.

And Christians might do a summer reading during the time when church attendance typically dwindles down during the summer time.  It injects some freshness to the faithful attending weekly and gives a small outreach reason to invite non-church going friends to a Sunday afternoon or weeknight evening reading.  It’s a low-key outreach to the non-practicing.

Anglicans in the US Episcopal Church have made Mark Schweizer’s series of mysteries featured in church choirs quite popular with Mainstream Protestant Christians.  The stories are fun and engaging, and have just enough Christian reference and content to make them viable as a social endeavor at church on a lazy Summer Sunday Afternoon.

By making the readings a short series of weekly for a few weeks, or the 1st Sunday each month of the Summer, you catch some short term interest and yet there is no long term commitment.  Making it a perfect social event for any seasonal time frame and one which most people can then fit into their calendar for at least a little while.  It’s fun and enjoyable, and well after all, it’s only for a few weeks!

Happy Dating and Relationships,

April Braswell