My mother always told me to never put all my eggs in one basket. Whether it was about friends, relationships, or time- it just wasn’t a good idea. When it came to my dating life post-college, I ended up doing just that- foolishly putting my eggs all in one basket. Now it’s not that I wanted to, I just thought that’s how dating in the real world worked.
To my surprise, dating post-college was a whole different ball game. It was not like college where you hook up with one person then casually see them for a couple weeks or just end it amicably because you had to see each other in history class every Wednesday.
Dating post-college is a complete rat race. There is no more confined group of single people in one small area. This shit was the real deal and you were either in it 100% or not. So I decided to join the rat race like everyone else and be in it 100%. Like any other jaded 20 something year old, I downloaded the apps. I started texting, swiping, dating, and “talking with” various people. I had some bad dates and some really good dates. For me, I was still trying to figure out what the hype was.
As I stayed in the game longer, I really started to find out why people in the dating scene acted the way they acted. I found this out because, I too, started turning out that way. Everyone had an agenda... whether it was the same didn’t matter.
The deal is:
you would go out and date people, put all your eggs in one basket, and then get burned. So the next time around you became smarter and distributed your eggs evenly. You fought so hard to protect your heart from getting broken that you didn’t really care who’s you broke along the way. You date the person that filled that space because your dating app crush didn’t answer you for three days. You sleep with people you don’t particularly care about just to convince yourself that you don’t need anything more. You text people just to distract yourself throughout the day. You leave relationships open just in case your current one crashes and burns so you have somewhere to run. You keep people on the back burner just so you don’t feel inadequate.
Check any 20 something year old’s phone and I guarantee you will find a whole laundry list of people they are texting, dating, seeing, or wanting to see, sleeping with or wanting to sleep with. We can’t trust each other in a dating aspect because we can’t even trust ourselves. This stems from not being truthful from the beginning, and living in the fear of being upped one. Dating in general is hard, but dating in a big city is even harder. What if the person you are talking to meets someone online, at a bar or at work, and they blow you out of the water? We are constantly at risk of being replaced, which defaults us to keeping one foot in and out of the door for those “just in case moments”.
We continue to be in the dating whirlwind until we realize that we are just like the rest. We continue to date and talk to people because that's “just how it is”. We tend to take things too far until we are too deep into it and don’t know how we feel.
It’s easy for us to hate those who ghost,
but even harder to realize that we are apart of the problem.
This vicious cycle of dating is only becoming bigger and more intensified from the actions taken by us: jaded 20 something year olds. So I’ve come to the realization, that in order to fix it we need to stop perpetuating it if not, continue to swipe right.