Is it love or is it lust?
“I missed you,” I whispered to him as I pulled back from our kiss.
I hadn’t seen him, the man of my dreams (or so I thought) in months. We had left things open ended, and the universe saw fit to bring us back together for one night. I had just ended my current relationship, and he had finally completed his military training.
We were both free.
I buzzed with long-ignored feelings and emotions. Here I was, reunited with the man that, at one point, I had thought I was going to marry. I kissed him again.
“I missed this, too,” he answered. …
An unconventional way to deal with fear of the unknown
I’ve been having an ongoing existential crisis since I became old enough to have things to worry about.
Because of it, I’ve led a pretty stressed out life. Not only do I worry about the present and fret over the past, I also agonize over what’s to come. It’s petrifying that I can’t know for certain what my future holds.
I’m a planner. I like to have everything mapped out ahead of time. I like to know what I’m getting myself into. I like certainty.
The problem with the future is, you can’t plan it out. There are a myriad of unknown variables and factors that could change things in an instant. …
“Alone” and “single” are not synonymous
Being single for the rest of my life is a huge fear of mine. It’s my worst-case scenario.
It’s a fear driven by the fact that I have not had a long-term relationship. As I enter my twenty-eighth year as single as the day I was born, it’s taking everything I have not to launch into an existential crisis of epic proportions.
This is where Laura Behnke’s well-timed master class on stepping into the power of your own story saved me from the self-loathing death spiral.
She reminded me that being alone and being single are not the same thing. …
It’s not as scary as it seems
When you move to a new city, you have to start over completely from scratch. You have to find a new job, new hobbies, new friends, new places to hang out. It’s a daunting task.
But it’s also exciting. It’s your chance to remake yourself and your life.
I’ve had to start over in a new city where I haven’t known anyone a few times in my life. I wish I could say it gets easier each time, but it doesn’t. You just get better at being comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Here’s how I start to build a life for myself when I have to start over in a new place. …
#2: You make excuses for them
Whenever I’m dating someone, I constantly gut-check myself by asking, “Am I really happy or am I just settling?”
Granted, I don’t ask myself this question that often because I’m chronically single.
As someone who’s been single for a long time, I guard my time and my energy very closely. If I commit to dating someone, I want it to be because I genuinely like them and not because I’m lonely and settling for the first thing that comes along.
I’ve had to compromise on some qualities I want in a partner in order to date the people that I have dated. …
It’s not empathetic or helpful — it’s patronizing
Whenever a younger person expresses anguish over some circumstance or thing that is happening in their life, some older people tend to brush it off.
“Well, you’re still young,” they’ll say. “You have your whole life ahead of you.” Or something derivative of that.
This is not an empathetic statement, nor is it helpful.
My one older friend (he’s in his mid-thirties) would say it to me all the time whenever I’d go to him with my relationship woes. It got to a point where it really pissed me off.
We have to be able to offer better advice to our young people. We have to better support them, instead of negating their feelings with words of complacency. …
Hotness does not equal compatibility
I once dated a guy I normally would have swiped left on.
I’ve been on dating apps for a long time, so I’ve been able to figure out the red flags in dating profiles.
One of them is when someone only posts pictures and provides no information about themselves. If they put zero effort into their dating profile, they will put zero effort into the relationship. I will swipe left on this guy one hundred percent of the time, even if he’s super hot.
Except for this one time.
This one time, the guy was so attractive, I couldn’t pass it up. His profile had some of the red flags — zero information, gym photos that looked kind of douchey — but he was hot enough that I was willing to give him a chance. …
Your time is valuable — and limited
Before the pandemic caused life to come to a standstill, I was always running around from one task to the next. I remember looking forward to one day or one evening in a week when I didn’t have plans — and they were rare occurrences.
But nowadays, I have a Zoom call with a friend for an hour and I need a week to recover.
With so much downtime because quarantine has confined me to my house and I’m fortunate enough to be able to do my job from home, I’ve had to become okay with being idle and spending days without any set plan or schedule. …
Do you like them or are they just hot?
It’s hard to find someone who likes me enough to want to date me, especially as I get older and the dating pool gets thinner. And admittedly, I am picky.
So when I finally do find someone to date, I’m hounded by the constant worry about whether or not the other person likes me.
But that’s the wrong thing to worry about.
It’s not about you
Instead of worrying about if they like you or not, ask yourself, “Do I actually like them?”
This might seem like a dumb or obvious question, but I so easily overlook it. I spend so much time and effort worrying about whether or not the guy likes me, that I forget to ask myself if I actually like him. I also get easily blinded by attraction, so I often have to check myself with this question. …
Only 10 percent of happiness is related to our circumstances, says Gillian Mandich.
I like making goals. It gives me something to work toward, and it gives my self-improvement a sense of direction.
I had a goal this year to finish the first draft of my book — a pretty monumental task for me, as I’ve never written a book before. And I did accomplish it.
But the short-lived joy of accomplishment was quickly followed by the crushing feeling of how much work I still had to do before I reached a final, finished product.
I thought achieving my goal would make me happy — but checking items off the to-do list can’t really make us happy. …
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