About The First Move: How We Research and Write (2026)

The short version

What this site is

The First Move is a small independent publisher of dating guides for adults. Six guides, one route: meeting people, reading interest, asking someone out, the first date, making it official, and handling a no.

It is not a dating service. We host no profiles, run no matching, and have no way of introducing you to anyone. We publish written guidance and nothing else.

Everything here assumes adults meeting other adults. Nothing on the site is written for anyone under 18, and the guides say so on their first screen.

What we are not

Not therapy. Nothing here is professional, psychological or medical advice. Where a topic touches on anxiety, we link the clinical source and stop there.
Not a pickup site. No routines, no scripts for wearing someone down, no techniques for manufacturing attraction.
Not a review site. We do not rank dating apps or take payment for placement in a list.

Method

How a guide is made

Every page follows the same four steps, in this order. The order matters: we work out what the question actually contains before deciding what to write.

1. Read the question

We collect the real phrasings people use, including the ones we would not have thought of, and the follow-up questions that come with them. A guide that answers a tidied-up version of the question is useless.

2. Find the primary sources

Where a claim can be checked, we go to the study, the register or the official policy rather than to another article about it. See the next section for what qualifies.

3. Write, then cut

Length is not the goal. Sections that exist only to cover a keyword get deleted. If a paragraph does not change what you would do, it should not be there.

4. Check the facts separately

Before publication every statistical and research claim is re-checked against the source by someone who did not write the page. This step has changed real sentences, including removing claims that turned out to be the opposite of what the study found.

Evidence

What counts as a source

A single rule: if we assert a fact about people, it links to something you can open and check.

We cite

Peer-reviewed studies and the journals or repositories that hold them.
Government and public health bodies, and university research centres.
Established survey organisations, named with the year of fieldwork.
Official policies and terms published by the organisation they belong to.

We do not cite

Other dating blogs, content farms or "studies" that exist only as a press release.
Statistics with no traceable origin, however often they are repeated.
Ourselves. A claim is not supported by a link to another page on this site.

Sources are listed at the foot of each guide, with the authors and year, so you can find them even if a link later moves.

Authorship

Why there are no author names

Guides here are credited to the editorial team rather than to a person, and that is deliberate.

The usual alternative is worse. Sites in this subject routinely attach invented names, borrowed stock portraits and credentials nobody holds to advice that was not written by the person pictured. We would rather carry an honest organisational byline than a decorative fake one.

What the byline is meant to tell you is who is accountable, and that is the site. If a claim is wrong, it is wrong under our name, and correcting it is our job.

Where a real named expert has said something, we quote them and link to where they said it. We do not put words in the mouths of people who have not written for us, because none have.

Limits

What we will not publish

Anything aimed at minors. The subject attracts that traffic and we turn it away rather than serve it.
Persistence tactics. Advice about asking again after a no, engineering "chance" meetings, or using friends to apply pressure. The guides say the opposite, and say why.
Techniques that rely on someone not noticing. If it only works while the other person is unaware of it, it is manipulation, and it is off the site.
Invented numbers. No statistic appears here without a source, including the ones that would be convenient.

Money

How the site makes money

Affiliate links, and nothing else. When a link on this site goes to a dating service and you sign up, we may be paid a commission. It costs you nothing and changes nothing about the price.

There is no advertising, no sponsored content, no paid placement and no newsletter list to sell.

What we do about the conflict

Commercial links are marked in the page code as sponsored, so search engines do not treat them as recommendations.
No guide recommends signing up as the answer to a question where it is not the answer.
The page on handling rejection carries no commercial links at all. Someone who has just been turned down is not a sales opportunity.

Corrections

When we get something wrong

We will. The policy is to fix the page rather than quietly delete the sentence, and to update the modification date on the page so you can see it changed.

Guides carry a published date and a last-updated date in the page data. Those dates are generated from the actual publication and edit history, not typed in by hand, because a freshness date that is not true is just another wrong fact.

Related reading, if you arrived here from a guide: how to get a girlfriend, how to ask a girl out, how to tell if she likes you, first date tips, asking her to be your girlfriend, handling rejection. Our privacy notice sets out what the site does and does not collect.