Meeting new people is a tricky business, and there’s always a fine line between coming off as interesting and coming off as weird. What you need to know is to just be yourself (sort of.)

One thing I like to tell all my friends is sometimes you need to hide the crazy for a little while. If you think you have no crazy to hide, then you probably are the craziest of them all.

The dating world is probably the hardest place to figure out what to say versus what not to say. I’m not telling anyone to lie on a date, but sometimes your date does not need to know the entire truth about everything in your life.

It’s like an interview—if they ask about your biggest weakness, you don’t tell them an actual weakness. You take your strength and turn it into a weakness.

It’s the same in the dating world. Just because you’ve seen the midnight premiere of every Harry Potter movie in costume does not mean that your date needs to know that about you right away.

If you get the feeling that your date may appreciate zany information about you, feel free to share. Just know not everyone will get your Harry Potter obsession.

As the relationship progresses, you can slowly reveal your eccentric personality traits. This way the person has already started to fall for you and the little things, like how you have a small crush on Justin Bieber, won’t be a deal breaker.  

Along with hiding the crazy, think about hiding the crabby as well. If you are out on a first date and the waiter brings you a regular Coke instead of a Diet Coke, flipping out on the waiter and telling him what an idiot he is does not make the greatest impression.

If you haven’t heard the rule “someone who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person,” you definitely need to memorize it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you say to the person you are trying to impress but what you say to others that really matters.

This all applies when it comes to meeting new people in general. As an incoming graduate student who has been out of college for a few years, I had to remember how to walk into a classroom where I knew no one and had to make friends.

I have plenty of crazy in me and knew right away that in order to successfully make a good impression, I had to hide the little things, like my fear of mascots and hatred of certain words like “moist” and “meatloaf” until they liked me enough to not think I was weird.

It seems as though everyone was thinking the same thing I was. On the first day of each class we had to introduce ourselves and say something interesting about us. The first semester, we all said pretty mundane things like where were born or that we had never broken a bone.

But during the same introductions with the same people our second semester, I remember thinking these facts are a lot more interesting than last semester’s.

Since I already knew and liked these people, the fact that one of them used to be a pageant queen and that one of them is addicted to nail polish didn’t make me think these people were crazy. I was just learning new things about my new friends.

The biggest thing to remember in any new relationship—platonic or romantic—is that a new person doesn’t need to know everything about you right away. Hide the crazy.