Do These Things if You Want to Survive Dating
Dating at 38 has taught me a thing or 20 about keeping your wits about you.
1. Be happy dating yourself first
If you are just out of a long relationship or have a habit of jumping out of one relationship and into another, chances are that you don’t really know how to be alone.
If you want to date, you *must* be okay with being single FIRST. And I’m not talking about being single for a week, I mean…a month, three months, a year.
What you look for in a relationship or a partner now is going to be different from what you wanted in your last relationship. You’ve evolved and you need to figure out what that means.
2. Write down your boundaries and stick to them
I’ve written about this extensively (I encourage you to learn from my missteps). Almost the day after I ended my 14-year-relationship, I downloaded Tinder (and then Bumble, OK Cupid and Happn). I couldn’t wait to get out there and flirt and feel desired.
But like many women, I associate sex with emotion and so I quickly got attached to dudes. I recalibrated and wrote down my ‘rules’ for navigating dating in a way that felt healthy to me. Yours may be different from mine, but write them down and look at that list often.
3. Listen to your gut
Sometimes you get excited about a match because the profile is just too perfect. If I cross a profile of an ‘edgy’ looking guy with dark hair, dark eyes, tattoos, a good job, a nice body, great taste in music AND who has kids from a previous relationship, I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot.
Every time I match with someone who ‘fits the bill’ for me, I tend to ignore that little voice that warns me that something isn’t right. I start slipping on my boundaries. I let things go on for too long, hoping that I’m wrong. So far, I’ve been right.
4. Don’t let the superficial aspects of a person compensate for deal-breaking traits
I don’t care if he looks like Channing Tatum (with the bank account to match). Don’t let pretty distract you from who he really is. If you can look past the lust, he may be showing you who you really is. And if he knows he’s hot, he probably knows he can get away with more than most other men would.
5. Remember: once a player, always a player
If he’s making plans and cancelling, if he’s asking you what you’re doing this weekend and then doesn’t follow up, if he’s following a never-ending parade of sexy vixens on Instagram, if you’re only getting “WYD” texts once the sun hits the horizon…you get the point.
Don’t make excuses for shady dick, ladies.
6. Learn how to decipher a Tinder bio
If you’re really new to Tinder, please be wary of any profile where a guy obscures his face, uses a fake name, hides his age, uses other people’s children to get attention (“not my kids”) or uses a bio which has been lazily recycled from some advice column in a men’s magazine. Here are some common examples:
“My grandparents met on Tinder so I thought I’d give it a shot”
‘ “Best son ever” — My Mom’… ‘ “Best sex I ever had — My last date”’… ‘“Funniest guy I know” — Will Farrell’ …etc.
Also…airline pilots. If you hit that, make sure you double-down on the contraceptives.
And I’m always fascinated by guys that use a celebrity’s photo as their bio photo. Like DAMN, is Ryan Gosling on Tinder? No dummy, he’s with Eva Mendes.
7. State your expectations upfront and ask for theirs in return
I almost never swipe right on a profile that lacks text in a bio. And emoji aren’t text, I don’t care how old that makes me. If I can’t glean what someone is looking for on Tinder from their bio, I’ll be asking about it pretty early in a chat. Why? Because I am a full-time working woman with a child, friends and my own passions. I have very little time to date and don’t want to waste it.
8. Rejection is a blessing — really
This is a tough one and I’m still working on it. Dating is mostly rejection. It comes micro, it comes macro. Someone matches and then instantly unmatches, a chat that goes cold, a date that never materialises (or worse, a date that’s amazing and then *poof*, they’re gone).
Reframing rejection has helped me get over it more easily though. I see rejection as a blessing, a bullet dodged.
If they can’t see me, they don’t deserve me.
9. Age and maturity are not the same things
I convinced myself after my first bout of dating that I needed to date older. I really wanted to meet men who took care of themselves. But nope, the 48-year-olds were just as emotionally stunted as the 30-year-olds. At least the younger dudes were a bit more creative in bed.
10. Don’t settle for “nice guy, bad sex” or “good sex, asshole”
I met someone this summer who I thought I’d have a relationship with. I deleted all the apps and proudly announced it on Instagram. He was passionate, smart, funny and ambitious. The sex was great. He was kind, polite and caring. But he was also misleading about his struggle with his mental health, seemed to have very little interest in getting to know me and expected me to take care of him very early on.
At one point, I actually acknowledged this to myself but thought that I could “fix” it.
The bonus tips
- Some guys really do just like collecting girls in their chat histories and have no interest in meeting up
- If a guy jokes about having a small dick, he’s telling you he’s got a big dick
- Clear your dead matches often. If there’s been no chat in a week, unmatch. Marie Kondo the shit out of your dating apps.
