Hello friends, if you’ll allow me, I would like to rant for a moment about the state of dating in an urban setting.
I don’t want to immediately say things were better decades ago, but as someone who is monogamous, vanilla, just wants a steady partner, it feels impossible to date with the current apps. I am in hobby groups, I’m on Bumble, Hinge etc., I meet new people. Yet I can’t seem to find anyone. I’m despairing friends, I’m despairing.
I feel like I’m picking people off an algorithm. The room for surprise and delight has been cut off. Now there is only space for cold hard data. Lots of pretty people with good education and it’s so hard to see them as people and not just another part of an ever growing list. Another dot in the scatter plot.
People who are in LTRs, how’d you find your partner? What keeps you together?
Other single folk, how are you finding dating to be in your current locale? What things have brought success or failure in your mind? How do you define success or failure?
I’m predominantly aromantic and so have pretty much entirely avoided any specifically dating apps, spaces, get togethers, etc - just have no interest in pursuing it just for the sake of pursuing it. I do have a LTR though and met my partner at my previous workplace, we went out because he wanted to stay in touch when I took another job and ended up hitting it off unexpectedly despite almost 4 years of mostly just having polite quick workplace conversations. We have somewhat different interests (he’s very into anime and manga while I’m more of a outdoors and animals queer hahahaha) but we get along well and have really similar personalities and values.
I guess the only piece of advice I can really impart with my own experience in mind is to just be open to unexpected relationships with people you already know! I do think it helps too though that neither of us came into this with big expectations, it was super casual and comfortable from the very beginning with none of the pomp and circumstance of first dates and navigating getting to know each other and all. I think folks can get really hung up on all these rituals of dating and it just gets in the way of organic connections.