Take Your Sweet Time
Because nothing is a waste. Not even the lowly hell of Tinder dates.
I don’t mind wasting my time with people. Okay, hear me out. Because right now that first sentence sounds like either I’m being sarcastic or I’m slutty. Sarcasm is frequent but not in this instance, and the nickname “slut” is more of an affectionate and ironic pet name my friends use with me, for example, (name changed):
And to some, maybe missing a night of shotgunning beers to instead watch the end of Big Fish while I fall asleep on my couch is a waste of time. (But I wouldn’t know much about the first option because I am but merely a 20-year-old child, not yet old enough to have ever legally sampled an alcoholic beverage… Right Mom, Dad, and police? You can all stop reading here, if you’d like.) In any case, I’ve done my share of both the former and the latter, and don’t feel as though I’m missing out more on one or the other, despite how I choose to spend my time.
My view on spending time with different people is the same. Everyone I meet has something new to offer to my perspectives and experiences, so why would I pass that up? It’s good to mix things up a little. I’m learning how to interact with varying personalities and learning more about myself and my own personality in the process.
So.
Last Tuesday I went on a Tinder date.
And yes, I can hear you through my computer screen saying, “But Jenna, you’re so young, and beautiful, and independent. Why use a dating app?” Because why not, super complimentary stranger? (In all honesty, it started as a dare to download the app, and I’m no chicken.)
We met for coffee and the guy was very cute. I’d even go as far as to say he was hot, for all intents and purposes. We made it through the usual small-talk of meeting someone in person for the first time:
“What major are you?”
“What did you do over winter break?”
“Any favorite TV shows or movies?”
But his answers weren’t quite as charming as his face:
“Finance, because I couldn’t be with those fucking nerds in engineering anymore.”
“Went to bars. Just got really drunk. Blackout drunk. Heh.”
“Uhhh. I watch Breaking Bad sometimes.”
(My response to that last answer was something along the lines of, “Love that show, especially Aaron Paul,” to which he followed up with, “Who’s Aaron Paul?”)
The conversation was one-sided, with me asking most of the questions. But I was trying to give this guy a chance because I still had to finish my coffee and had a lot of time to kill before my next class. Priorities.
And then Tinder date guy finally snapped back into the conversation and really found his moment to shine as a sex detective, (sextective?)
“So, where do you live?…
An apartment, okay, that’s cool. A single, right? That’s gotta be fun…
Oh, you have a roommate….
Well, is she there a lot?”
The date ended shortly after that with the both of us amicably agreeing it was nice to meet the other, but showing zero signs of wanting to go out together again.
And maybe this situation that I found myself in is exactly what I should have expected from a graduate student that I met on Tinder who was much sweeter via text than in person. But yet I wouldn’t call spending a brief hour and a half with this boy in a coffeeshop a waste of my time. I learned a lot about him, I learned that I didn’t like him, and now I know for the future to stay away from guys who don’t know who Aaron Paul is. But I could have liked this boy and maybe we would have gone on a second date, but I would never have known the answer if I hadn’t gone to meet him in the first place.
Meeting new people isn’t a waste of time. Being in a relationship that didn’t work out isn’t a waste of time. Growing apart from a friend doesn’t mean your past friendship was a waste of time. The list goes on and on. Circumstances change, mistakes are made. But just because something seems like it’s failed doesn’t mean I haven’t grown as a person in the process. And these failed scenarios have taught me how to create and maintain more successful ones for the future.
Ryan Hussey, (You know, the guy who I share this blog collection with? “The Bigger Picture?” Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s the blog collection you’re currently reading. Just smile and nod, it’ll make us both feel better), is also trying his own luck with Tinder, which he writes about in his Personal Guide to Tinder (Part 1) and Personal Guide to Tinder (Part 2.)
When I emailed Ryan the draft of this post to look at, he wrote in his response,
“At this point in my life, I’ve learned (or forced myself to believe, for sanity-related purposes) that nothing is a waste of time. Experience is important, and if you can learn something valuable or take anything away from an experience, then it’s not a waste of time at all.”
In all honesty, that last quote is the “tl;dr” version of this entire post. But what would be the fun in that if I simply told you to scroll all the way to the bottom of this post to learn the same lesson in a fraction of the time? Because after all, nothing is a waste of time.
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