Dating apps are helping glorify avoidance as a normal MO

I loved someone once. Not casually, not halfway; the kind of love where their happiness mattered to you more than your own. The kind where you wait for their message, replay their words, remember the smallest things about them. But the truth was simple and painful: they didn't love me the same way. For a long time I carried that quietly. I kept asking myself what was wrong with me. Was I not enough? Not interesting enough, not successful enough, not something enough. When someone you care about doesn't choose you, your mind starts turning against you. But slowly, life teaches you things your heart doesn't understand in the beginning. I realised that loving someone deeply was never my mistake. My heart wasn't wrong for feeling what it felt. The only mistake was believing that someone else's inability to love me back meant I was somehow less. It didn't. Some people come into your life not to stay, but to show you the depth of your own heart. And even though it hurt, I'm strangely grateful for it. Because I learned that I would rather be someone who loved sincerely than someone who protected himself by never feeling anything at all. So today I don't look back with bitterness. I look back with a quiet respect for the person I was; someone who loved honestly.

Finding “the one” is a pointless pursuit. It doesn’t exist, both people need to choose every day to make the other person “the one”, it takes work, it takes patience, it takes a level of vulnerability and self-awareness that most people these days just don’t possess. It takes being able to look in the mirror every once in a while and asking yourself if maybe you’re the problem, and if that’s the case asking how to fix it, and having a partner willing to ask themselves the same questions. I kinda gave up, I hope one day I meet someone because I genuinely don’t want to be alone but I’ve also been working on being happy alone and coming to terms with the fact that it’s probably just going to be me and my cat 😅

@hephaestion yeah, it also takes a partner who is willing to heal their own patterns while still managing to stay present and compassionate as you do the same for yourself. People are long term investments and attraction/things in common might be what hooks you in initially… from there it’s just work. Work that you should supposedly be glad to do.

@syl exactly. I think people think it’s a one and done and that everything will be perfect. Then you have one disagreement and they wanna burn the entire house down ☠️

@hephaestion generalized, cultural avoidance is a sort of widespread issue. Immediate gratification is what society promotes. It’s human consumerism, in the same way we now replace something broken rather than fixing it. Nothing that is valuable and worth keeping doesn’t require maintenance and intention, though.

@syl that’s such a depressing way to put it but you’re 100% correct. I often find myself comparing current society of the Mouse Utopia experiment and its not a flattering comparison

@hephaestion whew. I wasn’t aware of those experiments. I guess that lack of investment in healthy bonds and behaviors is a possible side effect of a society based on abundance of material resources but also human encounters

@syl Yeah it’s an interesting read, societal collapse due to over abundance of resources. The mice were more focused on looking good rather than socializing with other mice, birth rates dropped and eventually the entire colony collapsed lol sounds too familiar to modern day not to draw the comparisons.

@hephaestion thank you man, now I’m even sadder 😭 💀

@syl 😭 my bad, sad but educated at least. It’s a curse