Dating Was Misery Until I Learned to Break the Rules
Learning to date without rules made me a much happier human
Her skin was velvet, and her eyes could bleed sunshine. Her inner world was ripe and glossy, strong and direct, yet plagued with self-doubt. It was like the entire outside world misunderstood her. But I understood her. I understood her in every swift glance, motionless stare, unthoughtful movement, and innocent gesture.
Words needed not to be spoken. The same kind of animal lurked inside both her and me. The same breed, the same species. It was as if the same lingering pain from years of mistreatment by the world found a comfy home inside each of our hearts.
Like a scalpel had cleaved each of us open — the scars we shared were artificial images of what it means to heal — like a Band-Aid plastered atop a gaping wound. But we got up and braved the twenty-four-hour cycles every day just the same.
When we met, we instantly understood each other. And our meeting wasn’t fanciful. It was another iteration of our plights as lost souls looking for someone to compliment our lives in the high-tech world of the information age.
Dating apps feel plastic when searching for love, even though they’ve proven to be extremely helpful to people.
It’s better than the alternative, approaching strangers who don’t want to be bothered and trying to put on a show — like an entertainer or a puppet displays themselves for an audience.
I think dating apps allow us to be more authentic…but only if we’re willing to be more authentic.
We swiped right on each other on Tinder, and that was that. We started chatting and figured out we were something of the same person in so many ways.
It was the usual back-and-forth, the awkwardness of getting to know someone new — someone who you might be attracted to. But with her, it was effortless.
Our conversations flowed like the wine in the Symposium of Ancient Greece.
We shared the same awkwardness, the same darkness inside.
But at the same time, something wasn’t quite right between us. I don’t know if it was time or distance or life’s ever-unfolding chaos that surrounded us, but fate saw to it that we wouldn’t end up romantically involved.
Stubborn hearts don’t conform easily.
We may be too much alike to have made things work, supposing we’d tried. When you meet someone who compliments your destructive side perfectly, it’s best not to jump into the unrelenting fire with them.
Either way, love wasn’t in the cards.
But friendship was.
And that’s exactly what we did — we became great friends.
It’s a story you don’t often hear from dating apps. But she and I aren’t the only two people who’ve made friends through a dating app when what was intended to be a hookup went south, and we figured out that we made better friends than lovers.
Actually, I’ve got quite a few friends serious, long-term friends that I met through Tinder of all places.
And this got me thinking…are most people approaching dating all wrong? I know I once did. I remember the frustrating days of goal-oriented dating, where I had to secure the woman in order to feel whole.
I think it came from a deep sense of longing combined with the ridiculous belief that if I didn’t connect with someone, something *must* be wrong with me.
If my endeavors didn’t pan out to be fruitful as I’d intended, I would feel this awful tightness in my chest. It was like I was rotting away from the inside out, unloved and unlovable. No wonder dating used to be such misery back in the day.
And now I’ve got to let you in on a little secret: dating gets so much better once you ditch the expectations.
I can remember a time when if someone rejected me, I’d take it personally. It would hurt — a lot. It could crush me for days, following me around like a haunting specter.
And looking back, I realize that I missed out on a lot of wonderful opportunities to forge solid bonds with incredible people. I bypassed a world of possibilities before finally getting it all together and realized that dating is a journey, not a destination.
It’s hard to believe that 33.6 million people are using dating apps in 2021. We’ve come so far from the old days, back when people used to be ashamed of the pointless stigma attached to dating apps.
And while most people are on these apps to find a romantic partner, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture and get caught up in the ugly details of the cold, complicated world of dating.
As I’ve said before, dating doesn’t have to suck — as long as we don’t try to date while we’re dating.
See, I believe we put certain expectations on dating that make the experience supremely uncomfortable. We tie ourselves up in these awkward little restraints, smothering our potentialities in the cloak of anticipation.
These expectations are what kill us in dating. They put us into a state of emergency before our dates even begin. We pressure ourselves, don’t we?
We put unreasonable demands on ourselves.
And I believe that it’s this pressure that erodes the incalculable potentialities of joy that could be had in the process of dating. Dating is hard. It’s a chore. But it’s only a tiny slice of misery because we make it that way.
A friend of mine recently entered the dating pool after many, many years off. He’s been away for almost a decade. And he’d only been on a dating app I suggested to him for a few days before he struck up an interesting conversation with a woman he felt a deep attraction to.
They both felt that spark on the first date. And they left feeling elated — like they were both on top of the world. But after a few days, she brought up her politics which, let’s just say, were a bit too crazy for my buddy.
He felt that same hole in his heart that I used to feel. This time it wasn’t rejection — it was disillusionment.
He asked me what I thought:
Listen, man, you just went on a date and felt something special for someone. You two kissed after years of you not kissing anybody. And while I know it’s hard to put things into this perspective, you should feel lucky. A lot of lonely people out there aren’t having your experience. They’re lonely, sad, despondent — they’re isolated and scared. So what if it didn’t end up going exactly as you wanted it to? Tomorrow’s another day. And this is a sign that there is hope for great connections with amazing people — she’s just not one of those people.
He thought for a moment…
“You’re right. I should be hopeful.”
You rarely get a turnaround like that from a conversation like this, but hey, I’ll take ‘em where I can get ‘em. And I’m just happy that he started to see more clearly.
We spoke some more, and I told him about the friends I’ve made through Tinder. And I think everybody could use a bit of that perspective. Our culture teaches us to place so many demands on the outcomes of our experiences that we get lost and forget we’re supposed to be having enjoyable experiences.
And in case you’re wondering what happened to my match that ended up being a better friend than a lover, we’re still great friends. We spoke this morning. I reached out to her last night to see how she’d been. We joked and laughed about the absurdity of the world together, and for a brief moment, I felt the spark of Platonic connection.
Her smiles and overjoyed reaction at the fact that I’d reached out showed me she did, too, even if it’s just as friends. And this made my heart warm.
Picasso once said you should learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. If that’s true, perhaps we should learn the stiff, rigid, lifeless rules of dating like pros, so we can break them like authentic human beings.
Thanks for reading. I highly recommend the book Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. You can find it here on Amazon.
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