I do not enjoy dating, and also do not have much experience with it. I only dated a small handful of men (boys?) by the time I got married at 21.
Now that I’m older, I have things going for me that I did not back then. I’m a bit wiser, educated, and not in a rush to have children since I have four, but I find myself missing the naïveté of youth. I miss the excitement of dating and getting to know someone without the weight of the world on my shoulders. I miss the days when it felt like time would never run out, and we had everything to look forward to and nothing to regret. I miss the simplicity of days long gone.
Lately it seems that everyone dating at my age is in a weird rush. So eager to find the next person but too busy to get to know them, willing to make quick judgments based on looks and initial chemistry, and not interested in assessing for compatibility and depth. It makes me wonder if our culture has irrevocably broken relationships with its collective short attention span and fantastical definition of love.
Not all hope is lost though! While dating apps have trashed the modern dating scene, there is a focus online with emotional intelligence and healing. Many terrible people who have no real intent on “doing the work” use the psychological lingo as an attempt to signal that they are healed while continuing in their toxic behaviors, but there are also many good people undertaking the hard work of looking inward and correcting their own bad patterns. I’m sure my own bad patterns will show up on this blog in many of my posts as I have painfully become aware of many of them over the last several years.
I’m grateful for therapists and psychologists putting free content online, and in abundance. I am thankful for the wisdom of people like Matthew Hussey and Jay Shetty. I find a great deal of hope knowing that so many people are listening to them.
