First date, worst date?

Hey everybody! Sorry for the lack of updates late last week. I was busy in Pine Mountain Valley with "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" coverage.

Aside from some incessant daydreams about Ty Pennington, I'm back to my regular blogging schedule.

Let's kick off the week by talking about one of a relationship's necessary evils:

The first date.

Here's a handy list of five tips to follow before your first date. No. 1? Avoid "IYH Syndrome." That's In Your Head Syndrome, the dangerous trap of creating the perfect date in your head before the actual event. You get so caught up on a vision that the actual date, no matter how good, is bound to fail.

Interestingly enough, I discovered IYH Syndrome on the same day I stumbled upon this AJC blog post about the role expectations play in our relationships.

It's hard not to go into a first date with some expectations. In a way, that's a good thing. They often work as a base line for gauging a date's success.

But in order to account for the clumsiness that often dominates the first date experience, some of your expectations have to be malleable.

Weigh in: Can too-high expectations doom you on a first date?