Situation-ships have made it harder for us to build meaningful, intentional romantic relationships with each other. Like many others in their 20’s, I’ve been on a whirlwind of dates with people who have shown me a great time, provided me with laughter, affirmations, great conversation and good food; all the things that usually keep me interested in the beginning. I’ve also had my fair share of terrible dates, and ran into quite a few fuckboys. While dating I noticed that I had to hold back a lot of my true feelings just so that I could keep my potential partners at ease. The idea of a relationship often scares the shit out of people today. So out of fear of losing a small piece of a person I was playing hard to get and pretending that I was okay with going with the flow. I’d lie and say I was busy, push back dates, postpone meeting up, just so this person that I admired wouldn’t feel smothered. I didn’t want them to know that I liked them so much, I had to play it cool, I had to be a “savage”. I’d leave right after sex, not text them for a few days and pretend I was fine on social media just so they’d see that I wasn’t looking for anything serious. I thought I was doing this to appease my crush but I was only hurting myself. I yearned for human contact, I wanted to feel wanted, I wanted to be touched intimately without actually having sex. I wanted to build a friendship that would grow into a loving monogamous relationship but was afraid to ask for these things; let alone admit them to myself. I was lying to myself, I figured if I kept playing this game eventually someone would realize that I’m the shit and they’d wanna wife me but that wasn’t the case. I was so scared of revealing feelings to other people that I didn’t realize I was also afraid of my own feelings. Admitting that I wanted love was hard for me, admitting that I was tired of “the chase” was even harder, because the beginning of any relationship is usually the sweetest part and once you get past the good stuff, the hard part comes. I wasn’t ready to share my desires and thoughts with someone, and I wasn’t ready to introduce anyone to my family, because I needed to be sure that whatever we were doing wasn’t temporary. Which was hard to gauge because people change their minds all the time and the worse part of falling for a person is loving all the pieces of them that they allow you to see and then they switch out of the blue. It hurt to finally come to terms with the fact that I didn’t want to keep going with the flow. I wanted something solid, a relationship that I didn’t have to question, I wanted clarity. Over time I began to question why do I have to keep playing hard to get with a person that knows that I like them? It’s absolutely absurd. Playing hard to get usually gets us caught up in unnecessary quarrels because of miscommunication and honestly we’re too damn grown for that. PERIOD!
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