Dating as a Gen Z'er Pt 2

I had my first kiss at fourteen. It was cute, sweet, innocent and everything my fourteen year old brain could handle. At that age, that was peak romance for me. I thought I was in love with the guy, I planned our future together and thought we would get married. We obviously didn't; we are strangers now although I still see him around sometimes when I'm at home because Polokwane is a very small town. I have fallen in love a few times since then but I don't think I've ever experienced true love.

True love, to me, is unwavering, unbreakable and unparalleled fondness and devotion for someone. It is deep and mutual between two people and the type of love where you can't possibly imagine being with anyone else. You can't imagine a life beyond the person you're in love with. The type of love that you work on with your partner, where you choose to love each other everyday even when it's truly difficult. That type of love, I've never experienced.

This is not to say that whenever I had feelings for someone those feelings were fleeting or fake. I tend to fall for the emotionally unavailable and non committal people who tend to run away when they realize I really mean it when I say I want commitment. The type to drag you into situationships and friends with benefits relationships if you allow them, the type to lead you on, love bomb and breadcrumb you, the type to keep you in long-term unfulfilling relationships for years as they wait for their true love.

We've all dealt with at least one of these types of people, and I share this 'experience' as a way to show the reality of what dating in my age group is like. A lot of people aren't looking to truly connect with someone else, they are mostly searching for someone to fill a space in their life; someone to play a role. They want the benefits of a relationship, without the actual work of being in one. They want to have access to you and your time, without valuing or appreciating it. They want the meaningless sex, the emotional support, and they want it all at no personal cost to themselves. It's people who are scared of being vulnerable, scared of actually forming deep connections with others.

Now I'm not saying that everyone is like this. There are people who actually want to have committed relationships, who want to form real connections and fall in love etc. However, the realities of the dating pool have made these people complacent, needy, and to some extent even desperate. So these people tend to settle for potential, they settle for situationships, and they settle for circumstances that clearly aren't making them happy. It is all of this that has basically killed romance for our generation.

People are pursuing one another out of a lack mindset, there is an idea that the dating pool is swak, and therefore when they find someone who shows them even a sliver of what they would want from their romantic partner, they settle. There is no longer the idea that one must be pursued, one must be courted before getting into a commitment. When courtship does happen (the flowers, the dates etc) it is done with an agenda; and I say this as someone who has experienced courtship for all the wrong reasons.

Some might say that this is all a result of feminism, and bring gender roles into it. For example, say that men don't feel safe courting women anymore because women are independent. However, I'm a non binary person and I refuse to make this a gender issue. The way I see it, courtship should be mutual between two people pursuing one another. I buy you flowers, you write me a poem about how much you love the flowers, I plan a candlelit dinner, you buy us concert tickets, etc.

There is no reason why reviving romance has to fall on the shoulders of men, especially because we live in a world where the gender binary is slowly dying, in a world where queer people exist. I said in my previous blog post that in order to bring back romance; we all have to decide, as a collective, that we will no longer accept the bare minimum. We all have to set a standard for what dating is going to look like, what we will accept and not accept. We all need to get standards and actually stick to them instead of settling. In order to bring back the art of romance, it will take all of us.