Thursday 27 October 2016

3 - Dating.

I hate dating. It's a right pain in the arse. At the age I am, I never thought it would be something I have to worry about; but circumstances meant that from the middle of 2012 I've been single. And over the last year and a half I've been on a few dates, and slowly I'm finding my hope that this endeavour might be a success is slipping away.

It seems that everything is always based on a sense of immediacy, that if you don't have fireworks and a massive initial spark on first meeting that, well, there's no way it can go anywhere, and there's not a chance for anything in the future. Everything rests on that first date, and first dates are nerve shredding experiences.

It's very hard to be completely yourself when you first meet someone, as you're both trying to present the best possible picture you can of yourself in the hope that you might both get that mutual, immediate, spark. There's a school of thought that says a first date is almost like a mutual job interview; but that seems to be a rather too cynical way of thinking of it. Whatever your mindset, your whole future with (or without) the person you are dating is almost always based on those couple or three hours you spend together.

And it is a restrictive way of doing things; you're really not yourself. The nerves, the intent to impress, the lack of any shared background... just think about all your friends, and those who you have had relationships with. There's that shared history, the in-jokes you have with each other, the phrases that evoke memories acting as a kind of shorthand. These just aren't there in a first date, and there's just not time to build them up, unless you are very lucky.

I'm not saying it never works for anyone. I'm just saying it probably doesn't work for me. I suck at dating. Or maybe I'm just doomed to be single forever, and there's no-one else out there for me.

But the thing is, it's not like I've actually hated the dates I've been on; almost all of them I very much liked (but there was the one really bad one...), and almost without exception (that one!) I'd have liked to have gotten to know my date better. Having said that though, and this may seem to be a bit contradictory, there's not anyone that after just a first date that I've been 100% sure I'd definitely have wanted a relationship with; but I would certainly have liked the chance to have had more dates to find out, to get to know them better, and to just see how things developed.

Maybe I'm out of step with how things are in this day and ages; with mobile dating apps like Tinder and Bumble where decisions are made on the swipe of a finger, maybe immediacy is the key, and a single date is enough to decide. It's just so exhausting, and morale sapping, when you get that message the next day saying that there's not going to be another date.


Still, even though I've said all this, you just know I'll be back on the apps...

Wednesday 26 October 2016

2 - Delayed.

Okay. So back in August of last year, I said I should restart this blog. This was shortly after petulantly deleting every post in the thing, so I can't even look back at what I wrote. For a while it was a post a day. All gone. 

So now I will restart. But it won't be a post a day. Just when I feel like it. 

And I'll try not to delete anything...