I know I promised #8, and I'll get to him soon. I think I've found the perfect candidate, but believe it or not, he isn't my story to tell. He belongs to one of my good friends, and I want to get her permission to write about this paragon before I post about him. He's a stealthy one. Y'all are going to love him!
I'm currently sitting in my hotel room waiting to go to work and decided I'd write this. Mainly to get it out of my head, but also because for anyone who's been through the revolving door of dating, they'll get this.
I was driving to an event yesterday, and a dear friend called me:
M: Just hear me out – what if there are dating apps for lonely people who are actually based more on them finding companionship than hooking up?
Me: (crying a little inside). Well, hello to you too! And I hate to break your entrepreneurial spirit of creating the next big app, but that's what almost all of them were set up to be.
M: What do you mean? Everyone I talk to who's dating wants companionship, yet all they find are people who want to hook up.
Me: Yeah, but think about it. You've got every iteration of a dating app out there, and all of them have people on there looking for their person. Their companion. The problem isn't the apps; it's the people.
M: What do you mean?
Me: We're programmed to keep looking. We don't stop and explore the way we did in high school or college or whenever we first started dating.
Think about it. When we were younger, we found the lucky sucker that we were going to spend the rest of our lives with, and we focused on them. Mainly to the detriment of our schoolwork and chores. We wrote their name on our notebooks (girls, you know you did this, so don't even deny it), and we spoke with them on the phone for hours. Swearing we were going to DIE when our parents made us hang up.
I remember the first real guy I was interested in. We'd talk on the phone until we fell asleep (no wonder I'm so phone adverse now. Dude was in my dreams!). Write notes to each other and just spend time together.
Today, we go on one date, get bored and move along. Nobody meets our impossibly high standards, and we think the next swipe will be the next one. We've forgotten what courtship is, which is why things like Bridgerton (and if any dude decides he wants to court me like that, I'll be there in one of those Edwardian gowns in about two seconds flat swooning of the Mr. Darcy type who's brooding and dark and all soft on the inside) is popular.
We want it. Crave it, actually. Even you married folks still want to be courted. It's affirming. We need to be shown at any age; that we're still desirable to the people, we're attracted to.
It's the Amazon effect.
Our world has been so personalized to our immediate and baser needs that we expect that from dating too. We forget to write love letters. We forget that there is another person on the other end of the device, hoping against hope that this time it will be the right time and they can stop playing the game.
When my grandmother passed away, my daughter and I were helping my mother clean out the apartment. My mom was asleep, and my daughter and I found a stack of letters wrapped in ribbon (just like the ones you see in the movies). I went through a few of them and realized they were from my grandfather to my grandmother when they were first married, and he was at war.
He wrote to her every day.
Every damn day.
Sometimes they were long letters that spanned days, and sometimes, they were just short notes that shared normal daily bits of his life while he was away from her.
I didn't really understand the present my grandmother had left me until recently when I went back and read them again. This treasure trove showed me what I was missing in my search—missing the sweetness of learning about someone new without the distraction of the easy.
The swipe right for a new shiny toy.
I'm not saying I don't practice that because I did. But I had a gentleman who told me that when he met someone he wanted to get to know, he stopped swiping until he met them. As much as I wish I could have been interested in him, I wasn't. And believe it or not, he probably won't make it onto the blog outside of this. (although he had a pretty cool secret squirrel kind of job).
It made me think about the letters and the time it takes to really get to know someone.
I do believe that when you meet someone, you kind of know if they're going to work out, even for a bit.
But I also think that most of the time, these dudes (and ladies) are so distracted by our disposable culture that they want the next big fashion trend instead of buying the quality pieces that can become staples in their wardrobe.
Amazon, Instacart, Drizzly. All of this easy-to-get and instantly gratify us things have transferred into how we deal with people. (to the wonderful people of Drizzly. Thank you for delivering my adult liquid happiness in a bottle! And please don't ever stop! You made drinking during lockdown an artform for me and some of my friends)
I think we need to step back and take our time with things again. Everything.
My grandfather's letters taught me that.
And someone else is teaching me that again, with the endless playlist. (one day at a time, shirtless coffee guy). It took me a minute to think about it, but maybe we all need to pump the breaks on what we are looking for and spend time working with what we have.
Stop expecting the latest fashion or person to make us happy. And remember when we were younger, before all the technology? How we spent time getting to know each other in weird ways that we would have never expected.
I used to tell my kids-
Everyone comes into your life for a reason. You give them something, and they give you something in return. No matter how short their time.
We forgot that as a dating culture.
And I'm not saying that we don't deserve everything we want, but if we got everything we want, what would be the fun in discovering the things we didn't know we liked?
Just think about it for a while, and if you can – go find some old letters, or better yet. Make someone a playlist.
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