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| Coffee for one please :) |
So, ladies and gentlemen, you will be pleased (or displeased, depending on which blogs of mine you liked reading) to know that the novelty of dating has completely and utterly worn off and my pompous posts about matches, bad dates, good dates and everything in between have come to an end (for now). "Why?" I hear you ask. To put it quite simply: I have fallen in love with someone. This person is someone who has been missing from my life, someone who completes me and someone who I have a ridiculous amount of respect for. This person is me.
Before you all start rolling your eyes and thinking oh no - she is becoming a self-help cult blogger, bear with me. This isn't a post in which I am going to tell you all to throw your phones into the Thames and take up meditation in Nepal. No - I am just going to ramble on a bit about how I fell out of love with online dating and through that figured out who I was (as much as one can in 6 months).
My online dating experience:
So to clarify, the fact that I am spending more time focusing on myself and less time engaging in mindless 'dating chat' with virtual strangers does not mean I have become a recluse in the dating world. Just that I am taking a very much needed step away from it (well, the online stuff anyway - if Scott Eastwood happened to walk past, stop and ask for my number... well that's a different story). The apps, which I once found so entertaining, now bore me and on them I am not the carefree, laid back person I know I am, instead, I am just another disposable face. Judged in a second by a stranger.
In the past six months of online dating, I have been on countless dates. I have met a vast arrange of people, been on second and seventh dates, created my own dating rules, gained a stalker, came across more self-entitled men than I care to admit, I have "ghosted*" people and been "ghosted" in return, I even used them to conduct a social experiment.
Sounds fun hey? I have had some great times and met some great people but unless you 'click' with someone, whatever that means, then the novelty wears off - there are literally only so many awkward pauses and "so......um.....sure you don't want an alcoholic drink?" moments that I can take. Unfortunately, I'm not alone in feeling somewhat emotionally drained by this new way of dating. Almost everyone who I have talked to feels the same, and yes I know we are in a digital age and all that, but when did we all become so disposable? I felt like something needed to give, and plane tickets to Nepal were too expensive so phone in the Thames it was!! Jokes - I would never give my phone such an untimely death. Instead what went were the dating apps.
So this offline love you speak about...
To bring it back to the self-help cult aspect of the blog post - yep I am totally talking about the importance of self-love, which can really only be found offline. With the dating apps no longer a part of my life, so too left the pressure I felt when talking to guys. I tend to suffer from FOMO - there I admit it, I always felt as if I was missing out on something. I never said no. I didn't realise it until I deleted the apps, but turns out I had FOMO on them too - what if I was missing out on meeting a great guy because I wasn't constantly swiping?
Now, I couldn't care less. The one thing that dating takes away from you is the time that you have to truly be yourself - you don't have to make compromises or sacrifices, you don't have to do anything you aren't comfortable with and you can just have fun.
So my time got invested heavily in the things which actually mattered to me. I had a huge clear out of all my old clothes (five charity bags worth to tell the truth), I started going to the gym way more (at 5:30 in the morning - yep I'm that person now), freed my weekends up for time with friends and most importantly took time for myself. Whether that be in the form of a long bath, reading my book, an evening walk - or even writing this blog.
It's not been easy, I am, by nature a bit of a people pleaser. It's taken me a while to get back to where I was - when I was ok being by myself. As I write this post, I am currently sat outside a coffee shop, with a blanket draped over my shoulders, an over enthusiastic pigeon at my feet and a cappuccino in hand. I am quite literally the only person sitting alone. And for the first time in a long time, I am completely ok with that!
*ghosted is the term used when you have been talking to someone online for a substantial amount of time and then suddenly you never hear from them again - no explanation, they just disappear - like a ghost.
* *photo source from shutterstock.
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