Is This A Date?

Maybe it shouldn't be.

I’m not on any dating apps. If you ever see me on one, I promise, it’s not me. I don’t have a philosophical bias against them, I just know they’re not for me. But I know a lot of people who use them, and recently I had an onrush of thoughts about how people meet each other.

For someone who hates small talk, I do have one particular social quirk. If I encounter a couple that is on the older side, there is a 90 percent chance that I’ll ask them either how they met each other or what their first date was. I’m always enamored by their reactions to the question: surprise, usually followed by big smiles before they begin to share in disjointed recounting of their first encounter. They never agree on all the details. Some people disagree on when it occurred, or what constitutes a ‘date.’ Some can’t remember exactly where they went or what they did. But most of the stories I hear share one thing in common: they’re ordinary. In some cases, they even met by accident.

A photo of my grandparents, the love story that inspired my social quirk.

This is a reality of the search for love that I often struggle with. No matter how much you try to prepare or dictate how things will play out, you’ll realize that you don’t have control over any of it except your willingness to see and receive the opportunity when it comes. Upon recognizing this dilemma, I began to commit myself to a new approach to the process.

I don’t go on ‘first dates’ anymore. I’m sure they occur at some point, but I don’t relate to the event in that way. I’ve resisted the idea of turning into a date right away because it changes the way we approach the event. I’ve made some observations over the years, both in myself and my friends, when it comes to first date habits. This is not empirical data, but maybe you will find some helpful insights along the way.

It seems that when people approach a first date scenario, they bring a lot of pressure and expectations with them. It’s not just pressure on their potential match, but on themselves. We create an idea around how we are supposed to look and act, and we set an expectation for the other. We have preset reactions to certain things that haven’t even happened yet. It creates an environment where you’ll learn a lot about a person, but not necessarily who they are. Of all the things we can be on a first date, many people will choose anything over just being themselves. It’s like applying for a job that you don’t think you’re qualified for; you might get the position, but at some point, you’ll need to do the job.

We’ve become so conditioned to see everything “wrong” with us that we wouldn’t dare be ourselves around someone we actually want to like us. But some of the most meaningful bonds of our lives are forged with people with whom we never have to pretend. Why do we take such a different approach to friendship than we do with romantic love?

How we perceive the world is often correlated with how we’ve been treated by it, subjective as that may be. We are being affected constantly by so many stimuli, and rarely slow down to acknowledge the many ways we are being impacted and the ripples that can create over time. Our feelings about ourselves may be real, but that does not make them true. So we walk around with wounds that we treat like load-bearing structures within our bodies, critical to the foundation of who we are instead of things to heal, learn from, and grow beyond. We often seek out these new connections with an expectation for them to heal those wounds, despite the fact that this person did not cause that wound and may not even know it exists. We begin to obsess over someone liking us while we aren’t even sure that we like ourselves.

This is a battle that many of us wage. It is exhausting on so many levels that the mere thought of that previous paragraph made me want to go back to bed. Speaking of battles, there is a common term in recounting of stories from traumatic events called the ‘fog of war.’ It is easy to look back on major events and recall them, but in the moment that they’re happening, the information isn’t very reliable. The battle within ourselves isn’t any different. If you are still struggling with your inner self, the dormant performer that you really want to call to the stage but don’t trust that the audience will receive them well, then it will be very difficult for you to explain that war to someone else. Especially if the person you want to understand your struggle also happens to be someone you want to like you.

The harsh reality is that there are a lot of people in the dating pool who, whether they know it or not, shouldn’t be dating yet. They should be meeting people and making new connections and being the social creatures we are meant to be. But they should relieve themselves of the pressures we apply to the idea of dating. The most transformative period of my adult life was an almost three-year stretch of time when I didn’t date at all. I wasn’t lonely or alone. I met new people. I was intimate with a few women. But I didn’t date and was very clear that I wasn’t going to until I was in a place far beyond the inner battle I’d fought for years. I’d become so accustomed to chaos in relationships that even though I desperately wanted a peaceful connection, I also knew I wasn’t prepared to hold on to one without dropping it.

It took me a long time and a lot of heartbreak before coming to terms with a sobering reality. I may have already encountered someone with whom I had the potential to create the love I’ve always wanted. But I was not in the place to receive it or even recognize it until it was too late. To truly love something is to see it clearly, and the first thing I needed to love was myself. In doing so, I was able to learn and embrace some truths that were a lot more patient with me than I had been with them.

I remember my first real adult heartbreak. I remember how world-shattering it felt. I remember the long road to rebuilding my heart, knowing that it would never be the same as it once was. But another thing I remember is that my belief in love hadn’t gone away. It was still beating beside my heart, and I trusted that it was out there for me. But with that came a new fear: the last heartbreak. The one that could make me give up the search and walk away. The one that could turn me into a cynic, believing that every couple out there is either very unhappy or pretending to be the opposite. Or worse, believing that I was wrong about myself; that I am hard to love and it wasn’t meant for me. I think a lot of us are holding on to a fear that the first date, if handled carelessly, will lead to that last heartbreak. We are in steady pursuit of this beautiful thing, while worried that it will wilt and die under the slightest chill. We worry that we are the vibrant flower with too many thorns. We fear that someone will pick us and throw us away once they realize we are hard to hold. But what if we are wrong? What if someone enjoys the flower as it is, with no desire to remove it from where it belongs?

So I’m done with dating. I didn’t like it very much anyway. But I am really looking forward to asking a woman if she’s up for being herself with me over a drink sometime.