There is no ex of mine within a radius of 10 kilometers that I have not tried back for the past two years, four months and seven days. Somehow there are plenty of them here, because of the fact that Indians study engineering, as these men and I did, eventually live in Bengaluru, if not the real Silicon Valley.
It is true that you realize the value of something once you have lost it. That happened to each of these people, who now seem more special than ever before. But their love and suitability can also be exaggerated by the simple fact that I already know them. After all, we have achieved the first ignorant and dating, by 'making it official' and the wedding travel period, subsequent times of conflict, boredom, or just happiness, sometimes for years, until something or the other made a seat. And then we still had love for each other.
Why we keep going back
Now, in the open air, confronted with the task of selecting a 'life partner' from a sea of people with whom I have nothing in common, fame can never breed contempt. Familiarity now means safety (they will not kill me!), Comfort (they already know me!), A certain automatic release of love, gratitude, inside jokes, even a appreciation for my own life, because of the depth and history (someone really kept for years and I! Mad!). Perhaps it is the reason why we still long for lost love, even when we are flooded with endless options on dating apps. (Those remaining exes in SF may be those who go after that, who knows!)
Familiarity is now the antidote for trying to get a new person to get to know you, warts and so on, and vice versa, to be understood with the crazy hope and seen by a complete stranger. There is no evidence that the investment is worth something or will ever succeed. And try to detach the process from the desired result, to end in a meaningful relationship, the process itself often disappoints.
There are people I met on the apps that some of my good friends became in the city, even if we decided we didn't date. But just as often there are experiences so sour that they question the concept of 'dating', and your silly hope to find someone 'special'. Why would the universe otherwise ensure that you go through so many unpleasant experiences, if not to tell you that you have to give up your idea of ”the one”?
Patience as a gift
There was the time that I met this man that made me more and more uncertain – he was choosing to choose the place, he ordered most of the food, but also indicated that he wanted to pay – and after I said I would not like to meet, he was not able to pay him back (just not to pay in the first place! Days then I didn't have to meet. To sit at my phone for hours, waiting for the answer I should do – but it was still a torn connection about my striped hope.
I was far from good to like from one of these people. But the pain is not as much heartache as it is due to impatience and loss of faith. Every time the starting point of the dating app is violated – that people at least try to get to know each other sincerely; That the obstacle for a real relationship will be incompatibility or other issues that are discovered over time, not 'unprofessionalism', unfair and unwanted behavioral advertisement – you lose the energy to believe, to be emotionally invested and decent. And if you think it is only women who have to deal with stupid men, there are indications that men are also fed up with being canceled and treated badly. The trend of the 'women-in-mine-dominated fields, however, who are memes based on women who are the first to lose his interest in a man, also suggests that this is just women taken by men finally giving a taste of their own already confusing medicine of losing fucks in the drop of a hat. God knows that I have lost interest in people I just started talking with, perhaps because of who they were, or because life stood in the way, or because I stopped seeing the value to try harder than anyone.
Hurt, hurt everywhere
There is little incentive to collect the courage, energy and know-how to polite with strangers-in contrast to people you have known for a while. A friend in the same precarious situation as I believe that we live in a generation of hurt people who hurt other people in an attempt to hurt themselves – while they might hurt themselves. That technology is the cause of this apathy? – malaise? insincerity? Self-preservation? -Is a common diagnosis, one that I partially believe. Dating apps have ruined love famous: by compressing people in six photos and some boilerplate 'witty' text, and making you think endlessly about these ideas about yourself and another, until the many sided humanity of everyone is involved; By having a business model fundamentally at odds with the problem that it is trying to solve – for every pair that creates it, a dating app loses not one but two 'users'; By dangling with a new 'perfect' connection with every turn, so if you like one thing that you don't like about someone, you can just throw them away and continue to the next one. Soon our “AI -Concierges” will be supposed to date hundreds of other “AI -concierges” on our behalf, to limit us to the always “perfect” competition.
Instagram seems to read between the rules of my WhatsApp -Chats, where content pops up that tackles these personal questions. “If someone cannot meet your needs, it doesn't matter why. Walk away and don't compromise “.” He doesn't deserve you “.” “The right man will chase you”.
Do you love yourself a bit too much?
I can't help it, but I feel enormously confused about whether this emphasis on self-protection, disguised as self-care, is really employed by us that we do not abandon ourselves (what advice is that I could really use, to be honest)-or is the lake of hyper-individualism that we need to be needed for a healthy self-concept today? They say that growth takes place in the difficult, messy spaces of human connection; Your ego may not feel like it is “winning”, but you are still forced to change. I wonder if the frequent compromise of compromise and 'sedimenting' with weakness or loss a generation of emotionally left behind – ultimately searching and isolated – creates people.
So what should we do? Well, if I knew it, I would not try to wring value of all my romantic failures in public. So now it might be the time for you to stop reading – unless you have less value, more entertainment.
Is the answer in arranged marriages, which filters in design and, hopefully, integrity? I once made a shadi.com profile, but the crowd there seemed so smeared by people who did it for the wrong reasons, with an app interface that brought me back to 1995 and spam calls from Vrijers who are ashamed of Nobroker, that I didn't think someone I liked could be there. I removed it in a day.
Do I just have to give up both the process and the result, and instead things I love with the time that is recovered from the “dating -overhead”? Maybe I will meet someone who is cool. If not, I have spent my time at least as I like, and making more progress about things that are actually under my control.
Or, those remaining exes in SF – am I actually coming for you?
An internal journey
I think the real remedy, apart from making jokes about it, is internal and emotional. The 'engineering' metaphor seems to last: the proportion of people who are happily married is probably comparable to those students who reach the best colleges; Yet almost everyone has the exams with an equal amount of self -confidence, at least in theory, hoping to save it. Only, I enjoyed being consumed more by studies than trying to meet people I am not sure if I want it. But the chance of finding a partner is also better than succeeding in an education system that is designed to meet the needs of only a fraction of the total population.
Perhaps the resilience and detachment that were learned in those teenage days would be the more necessary and valuable principles to channel now.
((Sanjana Ramaclandran is a writer and marketer from Bengaluru, with a book by Aleph that will be released soon.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
