On love and couples
Stop dating. Now.
Disclaimer: please remember I have the love/dating experience of an amoeba stranded in a petri dish.
With that out of the way, it’s time for some eye-opening, earth-shattering truths.
If you think dating is the way to find love, a true partner, you are wrong. The fact you see Facebook ads about the latest dating app that delivers happiness provided you fill a profile doesn’t make it true. And the reason is because the approach to online dating, going out, or meeting/chasing someone in a bar is not the way to go.
There’s something fundamentally wrong in the pretentious thought that a systematic approach to finding love will actually deliver it. And, coming from an engineer like myself, believe me, this is a statement i wish i was wrong about.
And i’ve realized that through the building the team behind Olapic. Hiring resembles a lot like dating. You are, essentially, trying to assess someone that you don’t know, to fit some specific needs based on pretty superficial characteristics in a CV. The experts will tell you to setup a recruiting process, to test for qualities, to make reference calls, assess the culture fit. All lots of work, lots of research, hints of a rational process, sparkled with some qualitative assessment or gut feeling.
What no one tells you about is that you have no fucking clue how that is going to turn out. Companies change. Roles change, problems arise, organizations evolve, competitors fight, innovative products appear. And suddenly, that role that you were trying to fill in requires a different skill set all together. Long term relationships are, sorry for the redundancy, long term. So the reality is that bad shit will happen, she/he will stop being good-looking or hilarious, and whatever you saw in that person that night in the bar or in that okcupid profile will be as relevant as the latest score of your favorite soccer team.
Rational approaches to selecting and vetting candidates are just lousy ways of approaching the search for love. Dating, or lets-meet-random-people-over-dinner-and-maybe-we-will-have-fun, is just a way of occupying your free time. Some people like to play tennis, other visit art exhibitions, or suffer through a cross fit session. If you date to find love, stop. Stop, now.
What you should be doing is having fun. If dating is fun to you, oh boy, you have to try something (anything!) else more exciting. Travel! Learn to cook! Exercise! Sleep! There’s a world of opportunities ahead of you. Activities that will shoot your serotonin levels through the roof, and will, believe me, lead you to love.
You see, when you are happy, good shit happens to you. Being happy gives you confidence, opens your mind, and frees you in a way that will make love find you. Because when you are happy, you stop worrying about the aging clichés, the i-have-to-have-someone-to-be-happy, the i-will-die-alone anxiety, the i-am-the-only-one-alone-whats-wrong-with-me epiphany. And when you meet someone, THE someone, instead of being the junky desperately gasping for that “love” fix, scarred by the awful experiences delivered by tinder, you’ll be just a happy person. And these days, being just a happy person is a species nearing extinction.
So stop looking for love. Start doing fun stuff, laugh, surround yourself with other happy people, travel with your friends. And maybe, just maybe, when you’ve forgotten about all this love shit, about the dating, the protocols, the filtering, the nightlife… when you’ve forgotten all of that, you will find her. Or him. And then you’ll know. And then you’ll smile and think: he was right!
