In the real world, there was no such thing as âpassively singleâ. There was no such thing as a slow, monogamous dating. In the real world, you had two clear choices: You were either in the game, or you were out of it. And if you werenât in the game, you were already losing it.
And so, I did what any other jaded twenty-something would have done: I brought myself up to speed. I downloaded Tinder. And OKCupid. And Snapchat. I started swiping, texting, dating and âtalking withâ various people at once. I forgot names on first dates. I made notes on my phone to keep track of who was who. After all, it was what everyone else was doing. And it seemed to be the only way to keep up without getting duped.
The longer I stayed in âthe game,â the clearer it became to me why other people acted the way they did in relationships. Everyone had, at some point or another, had the exact same experience with dating:
You put all your eggs in one basket â you get burned. So the next time, you make a point to distribute them evenly. Youâre so worried about not getting your own heart broken that you donât really care whose you break along the way.
You date the person you kind of like to distract yourself from the fact that the one you really like hasnât texted you back in three days. You sleep with people you have no connection with to convince yourself you donât need anything more. You keep your options open because when one relationship crashes and burns, you need to have somewhere to run. You donât want to have to feel inadequate, so you keep the back burner full of people to fall back on.
Weâre dishonest because we donât trust each other â because we canât. No matter how happy we are with somebody and how invested it seems like they are, we never know when the other shoe might drop. We never know who else theyâre talking to, who else theyâre sleeping with, who they might meet at the bar or online or at work who blows us out of the water and renders us suddenly obsolete. We are constantly at risk of being one-upped and thereâs no way to shelter ourselves from it other than to prepare for it. To always have one foot out the door. To never be totally invested or all the way in.
Check any twenty-somethingâs phone and youâll generally see a specific smorgasbord of people theyâre keeping in touch with â one they want to date, one they want to sleep with and a few others theyâre keeping around âjust in caseâ nothing else works out. And do we want all of these people in our lives? Not particularly. In fact, itâs exhausting.
The texting. The dating. The small talk, the drama, the hooking up and breaking up and falling half in love and then having it all fall to pieces. After playing the game for long enough, we all inevitably start to wonder if weâre the only honest player left. Until that scary moment where we check ourselves and realize that, weâre just as bad as all the rest.
Weâre dating multiple people at once. Weâre taking things too far before we decide how we feel. Weâre keeping people around âjust in caseâ and we feel no remorse â because we see these things as necessary measures. We are desensitized to the ways in which weâre using other people, under the guise of âWell, thatâs just how it works.â Itâs easy to hate the people whoâve flaked on us but itâs harder to admit that weâre a big, consuming part of the problem.
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