There's an etiquette to meeting someone from a listing that nobody teaches you because nobody talks about it openly. It's learned by doing, or by watching people who've been doing it longer. After a while, you notice the same patterns in the people who have good experiences and the same mistakes in the people who don't. Here's what actually works.
Show up on time. Not early, not twenty minutes late. On time. If you're running late, text ahead, give a real estimate, and don't make it a habit. This is the most basic form of respect, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. People who chronically run late are signaling that their time matters more than yours, and that signal lands whether you mean it to or not.
Look like your photos. This should be obvious, but the number of people who show up looking noticeably different from their listing is high enough to be a real frustration. You don't need to look like a model. You need to look like the person the other person is expecting to meet. If your photos are from three years and twenty pounds ago, update them. It's not about vanity, it's about honesty, and showing up as someone unrecognizable starts the whole thing on a note of mistrust that's hard to recover from.
Be sober. One drink to take the edge off is fine. Getting drunk is not. The first meeting is an information-gathering exercise as much as a social one, and you need your wits about you to read the room. Alcohol blunts exactly the instincts you need most when you're sizing up a stranger. It also leads to decisions you wouldn't make sober, and those are the ones that tend to cause problems.
Listen more than you talk. People reveal themselves in how they describe their day, their week, their plans. If you're doing all the talking, you're missing all the information. Ask questions that are open-ended enough to let them show you who they are. 'What brought you out tonight?' will tell you more than 'What do you do for work?' ever will.
Don't rush the transition. The first meeting is the first meeting. It is not the prelude to anything else unless both people agree it is. Pushing to move things along, to leave early, to go somewhere private, before the other person is ready is the single fastest way to end a meeting that was going well. Let the pace set itself. If there's mutual interest, you'll both feel it, and the transition will happen naturally. If one person is forcing it, the other person notices, and the trust evaporates.
Read the room and be willing to walk. Sometimes the meeting just doesn't click. The conversation is flat, the energy is off, something about the dynamic doesn't work. That's not a failure. That's just data. Be polite, finish your drink, and call it. The kindest thing you can do for both of you is to end a meeting that isn't working cleanly and honestly, without dragging it out or making the other person feel like they did something wrong.