I caught up with an old friend a while ago in a coffee shop. This is usually how all my catching up is done because while I’m not madly in love with coffee, I am always in a coffee shop at least four times a week out of habit. It’s an expensive habit, but it’s the thing that makes me feel like I’m still a normal person, albeit for 20 minutes, in this crazy life called motherhood. But, I digress– in this conversation, nothing really changed with my circumstances since the last time we talked, but something major happened with her relationship which really centered the conversation. We spent quite some time talking about relationships, our personalities, and expectations in relationships. It’s nice sometimes to be able to talk to someone that I can relate to about this, because at times I feel like my expectations of a guy reading, having integrity, or having the common courtesy to communicate verbally are a bit high. Seriously, that reading component is a difficult one to find in a guy nowadays. A guy that isn’t staring at his cell phone counting his likes on Instagram is not the kind I attract, so I see that as impossible for me to find. Also the fact that I’m not actively looking makes things exponentially harder. Growing up watching romcoms with the picture perfect meet cutes were how I imagined things would be, but as you anyone that knows me, that’s not how things panned out.
To me, her relationship seemed pretty idyllic. Honestly, I’ve never seen a more insta-worthy looking couple with perfect physiques. Even the food they posted on instagram, which they cooked (because of course, duh) , looked perfect. But it wasn’t at all what it seemed.
But all this talk has had me thinking about relationships more than usual since we said our goodbyes.
It’s weird because while I haven’t really even entertained the idea of dating anyone in the last few of years, but I often think about what I’d do differently when or if I started dating again.
I was talking to another single mother about dating, and she echoed a lot of the thoughts and concerns I had about dating that I really haven’t been able to hear from my other friends. On top of what seems like an impossible ask for a decent male, that’s single, finding one that actually likes children, is more than OK with dating a mom, seems like even more impossible. It really gets worse as you get older too since you get more stuck in your ways.
I don’t know, it’s different now. I’m different. Whether I only went on a few dates with someone or had a full blown relationshit with them that lasted for a year or so, it all seemed pretty casual in my head. Casual in a way that I could never imagine a life with this person, so it wasn’t going to get so far. I told an ex of mine that there’s always this point with me early in a relationship where I think to myself “is this it for me?” and have an internal panic about things and how am I going to escape this relationship. I’m serious. It’s usually after the point where I spot the first red flag and act like I’m making a big deal out of it, so I convince myself to look past it because I already invested too much effort into something that would eventually turn into nothing.
I think this year, I’ll go on some dates. Because now I can honestly say, I don’t particularly care more about whether a guy likes me, more than I care about whether I actually like him.
Lyka Boss 