I’m not saying that I know everything there is to know about dating— far from it! I’m just saying I had a very messy dating life for many years and now it’s much more manageable. I look around and see people acting in the same harmful ways I did for so long and it breaks my heart. Why is everyone so insane?
- Where is the kindness and care for each other? The biggest factor that baffles me is that it seems like a lot of kindness and care is missing in the way that people interact with each other. They act on their anger, blame each other, and forget what really matters. At the end of the day, what’s most important is how we treat one another, and this key piece is too often missing from interactions.
- It seems like a lot of people play games on some level. I’ve heard friends say that you just have to make men wait or only do things certain ways in order to get an outcome they’d like. It sounds like total chaos. When did we go from being human beings to being each other’s pawns in this game we call dating?
- There’s so much mind reading. Technology may be partially to blame for this one, but it seems like a lot of people make up stories about why their partner is doing what they’re doing. There’s only so much you can glean from Instagram, but I have a friend who obsessively checks what her partner is liking on there as if it’s going to tell them something. What happened to just talking about our fears and insecurities rather than creating fiction?
- People have expectations that they never communicate to their partner. I had a friend just last night who was very upset because she thought her and her partner were exclusive. I asked if they had the exclusivity talk and she said no. I mean, my understanding is that I’m not in an exclusive relationship with someone until we explicitly say so. There are no assumptions because two people could be on totally different pages, but I see this same miscommunication time and time again.
- Snooping in a partner’s stuff is an indication of not trusting them. A foundational building block of a relationship is trust. It’s getting to know someone and starting to trust them. If someone doesn’t trust their partner, everything else about the relationship is shaky. This is proven when people go snooping through their partner’s phone or belongings. If someone is with a person they trust, they wouldn’t dare do this, so why be with someone they don’t trust? Needing to go through belongings in order to feel comfortable is total craziness and unnecessary.
- It’s easy to fall in love with the idea of a person. Blame Disney movies for amping everyone up to believe in a dramatic sense of love. People think it’s going to be fireworks and a fairytale dream when they finally meet “The One.” As a result, people are more focused on the idea of a person than the actual person themselves. There’s a focus on how perfect this person is, then when the partner does something indicating that they’re a human, it blows the top off the whole fantasy.
- The fear of being alone seems to keep people in mediocre relationships. I spent a decade running from being alone, so I totally understand what’s so scary about it. The idea of being alone seems like the worst thing in the world for many people. They avoid it at all costs. As a result, they stay in relationships that aren’t even a good fit. They’re mediocre at best or they’re totally toxic. It’s sad.
- It seems like no one wants to take a look at themselves.Jumping from relationship to relationship is an easy way to keep the focus on a different person. It’s much easier to focus on another person than ourselves. The thing is, relationships bring out both the best and the worst in a person. Ultimately you have to take a look at yourself, otherwise, relationships keep being unsuccessful while you’re left wondering why.
- A lot of people justify rebounds. For a long time, I didn’t see anything wrong with rebounds. I said that it was just me and the other person getting our needs met. Who cares if we were using each other? After taking a step back I saw that often someone is hurt when a rebound happens. It’s not always as clean of an experience as it’s meant to be. At the end of the day, rebounds are using someone else’s body and emotions as a scratching post to try to claw away the remnants of the former lover.
- I can spot harmful behavior because that’s all I knew for a long time. Look, I’m not just throwing shade and saying I’m holier than thou. I’m just saying I’ve learned so much about myself and my patterns that now they’re easy to spot in others. Each and every aspect I’ve talked about is something I’ve done myself. I’m just reflecting on how insane much of this behavior is. It’s actually painful to witness it in the world now.
