A meet and greet is a first date with a stranger from the internet who also happens to be offering you money. The money is exactly why people skip the precautions they’d otherwise take without thinking twice. Don’t. RAINN, Bumble, Tinder’s parent company Match, Seeking, and UK police campaigns all converge on the same handful of rules, and the sugar dating community’s own norms add to them, not instead of them.
None of this requires you to distrust him specifically. It requires you to run the same routine every time, regardless of how the conversation felt.
Before you go
Do these three things before you agree on a time and place, not after.
- Video call first. Non-negotiable, and not just for verification. It’s also the moment you get a read on someone before you’re standing in front of them. Refusal for any reason, camera broken, bad connection, shy, is itself the answer.
- Get his name and phone number, then give them, along with the venue and a time you expect to check back in, to a friend. Add a screenshot of his profile and photo. RAINN’s guidance is to tell someone “where you’re going, who you’re meeting, and when you expect to return.” Community practice goes further and treats a plate number as a reasonable ask if he’s driving, though no safety organization specifically requires it.
- Set a check-in timer. iPhones have a Check In feature in Messages (iOS 17 and later): tap the plus icon, choose Check In, set your destination or a timer. If you don’t respond, your chosen contact automatically gets your location, route, and battery and signal status, end to end encrypted. Android’s equivalent is Safety Check in the Personal Safety app: if you don’t check in by your timer, your phone shares your real-time location with the contacts you picked. Either takes two minutes to set up and asks nothing of you if the date goes fine.
Where you meet
Public, daytime if you can manage it, and your own transportation there and back. Bumble’s safety guidance is blunt about it: stay in locations that are public, and handle your own transport. Get Safe Online’s UK guidance says the same thing and adds that you don’t owe anyone an explanation for leaving.
Three things are off the table for a first meeting, full stop:
- His hotel room or his home. A hotel bar or restaurant is a normal public venue. A hotel room is not, and it isn’t a public venue no matter how the invitation is worded. Community norms on this are unanimous: never meet at the home of someone you haven’t met before.
- His car. Don’t get in it, and don’t let him pick you up, even if it feels like the polite thing to do.
- “My driver will bring you.” Treat any offer to arrange your transportation the same way you’d treat an invitation to his hotel room. It puts you in a car with someone you don’t know, going somewhere you didn’t choose, with no easy way to end the date early.
During the date
Keep your drink in your hand or in your line of sight the entire time; never leave it unattended, including to use the restroom. This isn’t paranoia. Drinkaware’s 2025 Monitor survey found 1.8% of UK adults had been spiked in the previous 12 months, women at 2.0% and men at 1.5%, close enough to parity that it’s not only a risk to worry about on someone else’s behalf. Only 23% of those incidents were reported. A separate 2024 Drinkaware and Anglia Ruskin University study put the lifetime figure at 11% of UK adults (13% of women), with roughly 9 in 10 incidents never reported. If you start feeling drunk after very little alcohol, or get sudden dizziness, blurred vision, nausea, or confusion that doesn’t match what you drank, treat it as an emergency: get to a public area, tell staff, and call someone.
You are not obligated to relocate, to stay past when you want to leave, or to follow through on anything just because you showed up. Bumble states this directly: agreeing to a date doesn’t obligate you to intimacy or further contact. If it feels wrong, leave. You don’t need a better reason than that.
Reconfirm about an hour before you’re due to meet. This is a real rule among experienced participants, not a nicety: if the other person doesn’t send a reconfirmation, don’t go, and don’t be offended when he applies the same rule to you. It filters out no-shows and gives both people one more chance to notice something is off before leaving the house.
After: the gift, and what comes next
If something arrives at or after the M&G, cash, a gift card, anything, it only counts as a gift if you didn’t ask for it or hint at it. Community norms are precise here: a gift is welcome when it’s unprompted, and reminding someone you expect one is the fastest way to end things before they start. There’s no schedule you’re owed. A second meeting happens if the first one went well for both people, on his timeline as much as yours; a slow follow-up isn’t automatically a red flag the way an upfront request for money before you’d even met would be.
If something happens to you
If you’re assaulted, your first move doesn’t have to be a police report. A hospital can give you a SANE or SAFE forensic exam (sexual assault nurse examiner) whether or not you report, and by law under the Violence Against Women Act you should not be asked to pay for it. DNA evidence is generally collectable within 72 hours; before the exam, avoid showering, changing clothes, or brushing your hair, and if you have the clothing you were wearing, put it in a paper bag, not plastic. RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-4673) can walk you through your options at any hour, reporting or not. You can decide about law enforcement later; the evidence keeps.
The printable version of everything above, with the reconfirm-text wording and the check-in setup steps, is the free download on this page.
Sources: RAINN’s online and in-person dating safety guidance and sexual assault forensic exam and reporting pages; Bumble’s First Date Safety guide; Tinder/Match Group’s IRL safety guide; Seeking.com’s Dating Safely page; UK Get Safe Online; Drinkaware Monitor 2025 and Drinkaware/Anglia Ruskin University 2024 spiking research; Apple’s iOS Check In feature and Android’s Safety Check. General education, not legal advice.