DATING/JOURNAL: THIS STUPID DATING GAME

When you are single, three things you don't have time for: wasting your time, money and heart. You start to weigh every option in your head, even before you ask a person out on a date! It's like you see all these paths in your head and try to see where they could end up even before they start, like you are playing "The Game of Life" or something! It sounds weird, but but I do it all the time. Example: You meet a person, they start to talk about themselves. They are Divorced, no kids, College Grad, they attend church, but not deep in it. They have a couple tattoos, drink & go out socially from time to time, has a close family and a few close friends. OK, so I look at it like this! You are Divorced...WHAT HAPPENED? Are you over them? You are in church, but not DEEP in church? How strong is your relationship with Christ? You drink socially, could that turn into a BIG PROBLEM LATER? It's all those things that come to mind the older you get in dating because one thing you don't have time for is DRAMA!

I’ve gone through all the major (and some minor) dating sites off and on over the past few years and I feel like I am constantly reading the same profiles over and over and emailing any and all the possible “matches” with little to no results. (Hmm, time to re-evaluate my methods.) After a few months on a site it feels like I’m getting nowhere and I want to just cut off my accounts, but I tend to stick it out. You never know, my searching might one day end up connecting me to someone really great. And I’ll never know if I don’t at least try. It IS tiring, but I press on. Some days I feel like I’ve done a marathon of in-depth window shopping and some days I just click through whomever the site deems worthy as a “match” and take a break from my own searches. It’s difficult meeting like-minded people in our culture and I am just trying to do my best to put myself out there, whether it feels exhausting or not. At least I’m trying! But you get tired of meeting people, tired of spending money, tired of online searches, tired of wanting to like someone and not, tired of not being excited about anyone, tired of people asking how it went, tired of being rejected, tired of having to reject someone else, just tired, tired, tired.

Nobody gets married if you don’t go on a date, and you have to go meet people to do that.  But the truth is that it can be exhausting.For starters we are all busy and we don’t want to waste time dating people we aren’t interested in.  More than that though, as you get older, you don’t have as much time to play around.  If I’m 25 I can kind of ride something out for a few dates, but honestly now not as much, or at least it feels like it.

But most of all, gearing up for hope, and then having it not go anywhere is just emotionally tiring.