You Don’t Need A Man (Right Now): Don’t Date Just To Date

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Nearly everywhere we turn, we’re confronted with love — flipping on a TV show will present us with two of its main characters falling for each other; a friend will excitedly text us about a first date they just went on; listening to a song’s lyrics will illustrate the fluttery feelings of a new love; an old couple will walk home in front of us, hand in hand; reading a classic novel will outline a protagonist’s journey to finding the one. Love is seemingly everywhere.

We crave to have love for ourselves, to experience what we assume to be the most wonderful, life-changing, significant relationship we could have. We look at everyone else falling in love and think we’d be better off if we could just make that happen for ourselves — that everything would finally fall into place if we could land a significant other.

And so we place a pressure on ourselves to locate the one; we search and hunt and hope to come across a guy that we can call ours, who can offer us this love we desire so deeply. But this fixation on obtaining a significant other for the sake of having a significant other can lead us down a damaging path.

Dating someone to fend off loneliness won’t give us the results we desire.

Being without a significant other can get lonely very quickly, especially when it feels like no one else in our life is struggling to find their person. We might find ourselves so longing to get out there and find someone, anyone, to call our boyfriend to fend off the loneliness that comes along with being the only unattached person everywhere we go.

And yet, if our main goal in beginning a relationship is to not be single anymore rather than forging a deeper connection with someone we already like, we’re likely to continue feeling lonely. Loneliness isn’t solved by the quantity of people around us, but by the quality of our connections. Investing our time, energy, and emotions in someone that we don’t truly share something special with will lead us to feel even more isolated than being on our own.

Getting into the wrong relationship will only distract us.

Every relationship in our life takes from us. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — kindred spirit friends and beloved family members deserve our attention and affection. But the reality of having other people in our life is that they’ll take up some of our attention and energy.

This is what makes getting into the ‘wrong’ relationship — a relationship that we’re in simply for the sake of being in a relationship — particularly detrimental; we’re not just distracting ourselves with this person, but taking away from ourselves by giving them access to us in the context of a romantic relationship, making it so that if a better match did come along, we might not notice or be prepared to cultivate another connection.

It allows us to ignore what’s wrong.

A romantic relationship has a special way of making us feel like life is finally headed in a direction; we crave to feel as though we’re moving forward, like we have happenings to update old friends on, something to say we’ve accomplished at the next family dinner, a thing we can use to combat the voices that tell us we’re never going to find someone to love us.

But this also enables us to sweep our lack of happiness, fulfillment, and purpose under the rug. We’re able to take our eyes off of all that’s wrong, or just not working out as we’d hoped, and place our happiness in a relationship, any relationship. This quiets our pressing need to actually make the productive life changes that would’ve led to a sense of growth and direction in life, and leads us to define our worth and ability to be happy on whether or not we’ve been “chosen” by someone.

It’s not fair to the other person involved.

We might come to the conclusion that we’re dating for all the wrong reasons if we do some deep soul searching and reflection, but we won’t fully be able to discern our significant other’s reason for being in the relationship — which might end up being because they truly like us and hope the relationship will move forward.

We can’t assume the other person is secretly on the same page as we are, opening up the risk of unintentionally hurting someone who actually cared for us. Whether or not we feel romantically towards someone, we can empathize with the pain and confusion of being led on and feeling used by someone when we could’ve been spending our time more usefully.

Waiting will save us heartache.

Being with the ‘wrong’ person won’t only distract us, keep us from growing, or act as a temporary relief from loneliness, but create unnecessary ties to and investment in someone we know we won’t end up with. 

Even if we aren’t in something for the long run, by playing the part of a significant other, we’re confusing ourselves, our hearts, and our minds, and may even do something we regret in the hopes of convincing ourselves it wasn’t a mistake to get involved in the first place. It’s always in our best interest to keep ourselves free of needless emotional ties, heartache, and confusion.

In short…

You don’t need a man — right now. Dating the wrong guy for the sake of dating at all will only lead to disappointment, weariness, and confusion. Waiting to date the right man will one day prove to be worth the wait.