The obsession with dating

Obviously, this is just my opinion.

Relationships have become so idealized and so sad. There's so many people who don't know how to build a good foundation, or how to be healthy to other people, who want and deserve love and that presents itself as rushed romance, anxious attachment, and perpetual heartbreak. That girl you met two weeks ago is not your soulmate, that boy you've been with a month is not your twin flame. Please slow down and make sure you're learning who they actually are outside of your head. 

The process of developing a relationship, a real stable one, has been decentered but that's the fun part. The strange in-between, the anticipation building as feelings do, the 'waiting for the right time'. The romance of romance has been stripped away, hilariously, because people want to be in love. And that includes me. The irony moves me. In being so obsessed with finding our other halves so many people have forgotten that a) you yourself need to be a complete person with a complete personality without someone else, dating someone to complete yourself is codependency; b) forever is a long time and that's what you have to get to know someone, you don't need to lock things in after 2 months you can wait. 

Also, a lot of the people doing all this rushing are people who are not ready to date yet. They are just figuring out what a crush feels like and don't know how to operate within that. You don't have to date your crushes and sometimes it's advised you don't. Like meeting your heroes, it can ruin your perception of them if things end badly, ask yourself if you want to be that close or just admire from afar. 

Romance is overhyped and people don't know what that looks like for them but they know they want it. It's the blind dating the blind because people are trying to force forever without the tools to make it work right now. I, personally, am just leaving the part of my life where I was in survival mode 24/7, of course I'm not ready for a relationship. I'm barely ready to speak to other human beings normally. Knowing that doesn't stop me from wanting to love and be in love though, I get it. I want it, but I have to stop myself because I don't how to do that right now. 

Plus! Some of you don't want relationships, you want companionship. You want the kind of relationship where you can cuddle and hold and go out and do all the cutesy relationship shit, without all the actual messiness of a relationship. That is called companionship and is perfectly acceptable. It's okay to not want more than that, it's okay to not be able to offer more than that for a plethora of reasons. It took therapy for me to sit with the fact that I am just not ready for more than companionship right now. That's all I can properly and healthily offer and that is ok. More on that in another post. 

I get so strung up about this kind of stuff because it's something I always fall victim to. I don't want to jump from strangers to a relationship, I want to know what you look like first as my teammate, as my companion, and as my friend. It's so easy to get too excited, it's so easy to fall straight into another person but the romance of being in love is doing it on purpose. Loving someone, every day, on purpose. Choosing someone, every day, on purpose. Every relationship I've ever taken slowly I've truly enjoyed. They were not my other half or my twin flame, but they were mine in a way that was so unique to us. They'll never be that person for anyone else, and I'll never be the same for anyone else either because we took the time to build something special and stable and unique. 

I feel like people are looking for that unique relationship and that eagerness translates to rushing, I get it because I do that. But those kinds of relationships only ever find me when I chill the fuck out and look at the other person as a whole person and not as an idealized lover version of them. 

Romance is so much more than meeting someone and "clicking", it's choosing them every time. It's choosing their flaws, their ideologies, their habits, their style, their aesthetics, their family, etc,.  How can you choose a stranger? I don't believe in things like "fate" bringing people together, I believe we manifest our fated partners with our choices. If everyone slowed down I'm sure we could all manifest our actual better halves, rather than being stuck in a cycle of crushes that fall apart and relationships with no foundation. 

I don't know, maybe I'm writing this because I really was the one who needed to see it, but I really hope people stop making candle-flames into house fires for the sake of being warm.