5 Things I’ve Learnt About Dating Again in 2019*

Oh ho, it’s been a while since I sat down to write a dating related post. The main reason being, I haven’t been dating.

I had my heart broken at the very end of 2016, and after a few forays out into the world of men again, I decided to just leave it well alone. No one gets everything, right? I was working for myself, had a home, went on holiday as much as I could afford it and had a lovely daughter. I could be content with that. Or so I thought.

Last year I turned 30. That’s 12 years of real boyfriends (not the hand holding in the school yard kind) and if I’m honest, 12 years of heart ache. My longest relationship was 3 years. At 30 most people I know have been in relationships twice as long, or even longer. I felt like a bit of a failure in the love department and if i’m honest, I felt like I was lacking. So I reached out, and I started to talk. And by talking I think I finally got to grasps with myself as a person who dates. And when i’m ready to try again, as a woman in my 30s, I’m going to try (I mean it, I will try) to remember everything I’ve learned so far;

Credit

Being in a Relationship Doesn’t Define You
At school I was the ugly duckling. Even now I don’t consider myself any of the positive adjectives that people use to describe someone’s level of attractiveness. But the difference is, I’m not insecure about it any more as I know I have a lot more to offer someone than the way I look. In my late teens and early 20s I felt like I needed a man interested in me to be a valuable person. And I guess in a way, that sort of thinking got me into trouble. I met bad men because I craved their interest in me. And I wish instead of working to make them happy, I worked to make myself happy. Which is what I do now. I only do things that make me happy. Which includes the type of men I date (haha). In the past I never turned down anyone for fear of them rejecting me. Over the last few years I have made a u-turn. It’s been hard, but it’s a valuable lesson and all I wish is that I picked it up earlier than at 29/30.

Male Brains Work Differently
If there is anything I’m going to teach my daughter about boys, it’s going to be this. But I want to start out by saying this isn’t the “boys will be boys” lecture (I hate this on such a level)  this is that men prioritise things and have a different thought process to women. I spent so much of my early years saying “Why isn’t he doing that?” “Why is he saying that?” and trying to rationalise male behaviour rather than accepting and moving on. Men do not feel the need to talk about every single thing. Men do not need to analyse everything. These are two concepts I struggled to grasp even though I had grown up seeing my dad doing and saying things that the other three females in our house were baffled by.

HOWEVER, like everything, this doesn’t apply to all men. There is a grey area and that is something I also need to work on identifying.

Online Dating Isn’t the Devil
You can find love online. In this fast paced world sometimes online dating is the only way to go. And good things can come on it. Every year I meet more and more couples that met through online dating over the more traditional methods. Why? Because a lot of people these days don’t end up with their high school sweethearts, a lot of companies don’t allow you to date your co-workers and as you get older a lot less people want to go out on a Saturday night. From now on, online dating will be the only way I go, and thankfully there are free dating websites that can help me with this. And maybe one day, I’ll be one of those positive statistics that met their dream date through dating on the web.

Long Distance Can Work (if you BOTH work at it)
I’ve experienced long distance a couple times now, and it is something I’d even consider again in the future. Because truth be told, I like my space. And guess what, long distance can work. However BOTH couples need to work at it and you need to both have the goal that one day you’ll live together. As soon as one side starts slacking off, the other has to pick it up and that’s when things start falling apart. You both have to want it and you both have to put the work in and communicate. My last relationship sadly ended because only one of us were putting in the work and it becomes exhausting. It made me paranoid and clingy and ultimately drove the other person away. It took me a long time to accept it wasn’t all my fault, he’d stopped trying (for whatever reason) so I was struggling under the distance alone.

No Couple is Perfect
Last year one of my good friends gave me the best piece of advice “comparison is the thief of joy” and since then I’ve held onto it tightly. One of the things that has slowly eaten away at past relationships was comparing what I had to what everyone else had. And nowadays that’s what so many people do because it’s so easy to see other lives through social media. But I must always remember that no lives are perfect. What we see on the screen is just a small chosen snippet of someone’s life. People want to show the best bits of their relationship, they don’t want to show the arguments, the disagreements or even the nights someone sleeps on the sofa. Most, if not all couples go through rough patches, but what makes a couple is how they choose to over come them. And this isn’t stuff that people share with the world, it’s personal to the couple. So from now on, this is something i’m going to remember.

So if you’ve decided that 2019 is going to be your year for dating. Maybe re-evaluate how you’re going to approach it. Are you going to meet in person, are you going to look for dating sites in Australia (if that’s where you live), or are you simply going to allow yourself to be open to love? Keep me updated!

This is a collaborative post. Thank you for reading.