First dates. They are the adult version of dodgeball, but in reverse.

Think about it. In dodgeball, you're all alone and you have to find a way to stand out enough to be picked for a team, but not so much that the kid doing the picking thinks you're a better player. You want your talents to blend in with the crowd, be a team player. But as an adult, you want to be plucked from the team you are on and made half of a pair. Blending in as an adult will keep you single for a long time. You have to go from presenting yourself as a team player to showing that you are the strongest player on the field - the best better half, as it were. It's dodgeball, in reverse. How does that happen? Well, I'll tell ya.

Remember fourth grade? You and every other kid in school would try to get to the playground as early in the morning as their parents would let them. You would run out onto the gravel area where the best game on the playground was played - a ton of kids standing around watching the cool kids getting ready to play dodgeball. There would be much jockeying for position as the self-appointed team captains scanned the crowd to see which ones would be lucky enough to be included in the game.

And there you would stand, kicking the dirt with your shoes, very intently moving rocks around as though you were on the verge of finding the Holy Grail. Some days, the magic worked and you were called in one of the final rounds. Your contribution to the team might be minimal, but no matter, you were on the team. You weren't one of the ones on the outside looking in. This time. You played the game, shored up the really good players, and occasionally got to thrown the ball yourself. You were a team player.

So now you're an adult and you're part of a few teams, probably more than you think. There's the team you work with, the team you hang with on the weekends, the team you see at the gym every day, even your family is a team. But in the adult world, if you are a part of a team by yourself, there's something wrong with you. You're supposed to be a part of a team in public, but in private, you are supposed to be half of a pair. And if you're not, there's definitely something wrong with you.

What do you do when you need another half to your pair? You start looking at your teams, because even though you might not pick from your teams, everyone on your team comes equipped with their own personal teams, and their teams are brand new to you, and you to them. So you start kicking the figurative ground with your shoe around the people who's teams you think you might want to scope out. If your team members are as smart as you hope they are, it doesn't take too long to get an invitation to the next backyard barbeque and a chance to take a look at their team. So you go to a couple of their things and if you're lucky, one of the new team members emerges as a potentially potential half to your pair.

Knowing you, you end up picking out the slightly damaged guy in the bunch. We all do. On paper and in person, he's a great catch. Gainfully employed, comes from a nice family, drives a grown-up car. He's the guy every girl wants to be with because everyone knows he treats his women like queens, and every guy wants to be because everyone knows he only dates women who deserve to wear the crown in the first place. But he's the serial dater of the crowd. He always seems to have a great girl on his arm, but hardly ever the same one twice. There was that disastrous marriage six years ago, your friend tells you, and when it ended, he said that was the last time he would ever open himself like that. And he's held true to his word. “Until he meets me,” you tell your friend, “I can change his mind.” No woman has a complete dating history until she has tried to "change a man." To paraphrase John and Olivia, he's the one that you want.

It's back to the ground kicking again. The first time you met him, he was with a great looking girl on his arm, but for the last three get-togethers, he has been alone. When asked why he seems to be alone a lot lately, he says something about how all the girls he knows suddenly needing to work weekends. At the next house party, you both hang around the kitchen until you find yourselves alone. You talk and smile and laugh at each other's jokes. You finish your glass of wine and he picks up a bottle, cocking his head to the side in the universal can-I-get-you-some-of-this head cock. You smile and hold out your glass. If you're lucky, the sun is a burnished bronze orb in the early summer dusk sky. It streams through the backyard window and casts it's glow on the terra cotta tiles of the tastefully appointed kitchen, which then cast their glow on your flawless skin and set your eyes on fire.

But in a good way.

You talk some more, laugh at each other's jokes some more, drink a glass of wine, and then another. When it comes time to eat, he asks if he can join you. You say yes, and pretty soon, everyone on the patio notices the potential possibility of a new team starting. And then at the end of the night, he asks you on a date. A first date. Just the two of you, away from the team. And it's a good first date. Then there's a second, and a third, and so on, and so on. Before you know it, you go from being just part of a team, to being half of a pair. Reverse dodgeball. And it all starts with a first date.

Just like this column. It's my first date with you.

In the coming columns, I'll tell you my stories and I hope you tell me yours. Because that's what a relationship is all about. And relationships are what this column is all about. Even though it did start out with a dodgeball game.

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Patricia Martinez is the co-host Mike in the Morning Show, 93.1 KISS FM. If you are looking for some love advice from Patricia, please send an email to info@epmediagroup.com with Love in the subject line.