A case for dating

I have always admired people who marry their first girlfriend/boyfriend. I am not sure whether this is because (a) they are lucky to have found "the one" on their first go or (b) they have an incredible sense of commitment. In my opinion, the number of people who marry their firsts is declining, or maybe this is a function of the people that I know.

I am not exactly surprised. Because I certainly do not want to marry my first boyfriend (and I am not sorry, thankyouverymuch) for reasons that I do not wish to disclose right now (maybe someday). I view this whole "dating" thing as a journey of discovery of many many things that I otherwise would not have found out.

I mean, look at it this way. I was raised in a family whereby dating was (is?) discouraged. My mum put it as "the more guys you date, the more your value declines", as if my worth as a person can be measured by the number of people that I am not with. In her view, the best way to get married is to marry the first person you date. In order to do this, you must not date people that you don't want to marry. There is a certain kind of madness to her approach, and I admit that it is not without its merits (and yes, judging by the double negatives that I just wrote, I had convinced myself of the merits instead of actually believing it in the first place).

The negative correlation of the guys you date and your worth as a person, whether imagined by my mother, or deemed as real by society (or imagined by my mother as deemed real by society), is to a certain degree reflected by the negative connotations of a woman who is promiscuous. The difference is that in my mother's case, you do not have to sleep with those guys to experience personal value reduction; it automatically happens as you date the guys in question. Sometimes, depending on her mood, she even classifies guys who are close to you into this category. Yes, that's right, you don't even have to date, you only need to be friends and whoops - you are suddenly "less" of a person.

The ultimate merit to this approach (that I can think of) is that it prevents you from repeated heartbreaks. If you have not experienced a heartbreak in this life time, you can count yourself lucky. The rest of us, mere mortals, well, we've had at least one, and it was nasty, and it took all of the ounce of strength in our bodies to recover and "mend" this broken heart. And for a while, we exist in this vacuum whereby we do not think we can ever love again. Yes, all of these sounds really dramatic, but it is also true. It felt like life was not worth living, at least momentarily. And to be spared of this pain, yes, okay, I will completely and totally sign up for it, not withstanding the invention of the break up pill.

But of course deep down I believe that experience has its own value and this is why the workforce places a premium on experience (that is, more experienced workers are paid more than their relatively inexperienced counterparts). Perhaps personal experience is not exactly something that you can put a dollar value on; however, it does not negate its value. If anything, it is even more valuable because it can't be bought by money. You can only acquire such experience (and grow from it) by experiencing it yourself. Experiencing pain is how we grow, and hopefully we grow to be better versions of ourselves (some of us don't). Protecting children from pain is the instinct that every parent in this planet has (well, almost all). I try to remind myself that if ever one day I am blessed enough to have children, then I need to make sure that I treat them like the person they are, because that's what they really are. And I may as well be saying all of this because I do not have kids yet, but the one thing that resonates with me is Khalil Gibran's poem titled Children whereby he stated: your children are not your children.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a license to go around and break people's hearts. That is so terrible. Whilst deep down I do not believe that such people exist, I have witnessed quite a few experiences whereby it is actually true. If you've never come across such people, count yourself lucky. Because there are people like that, for whatever reason, and they all sleep like a baby at night. As to how they manage to do this, that remains a mystery to me.

My preference is to date as many people as possible before you get married, if only to get to know yourself and what is it that you want from a life partner. According to my mother this would devalue you as a person, according to me, this is just a part of finding out who you are and what you want, if you do not know it already. Or maybe, it can be as simple as this: you think you know what you want, but you have not experienced this part of life that you may end up liking. I mean, really, there is no harm in experimenting, insofar as the experiment is done within reason, no?

I've dated quite a few people, which means, I have quite a few people with the label exes. Somewhat rather fortunately, most of these people I am not exactly in touch with. That's another thing, by the way, I do not believe in being friends with your exes, but that's another blog entry, another time.

I admit, there was a time in my life whereby I seemed to be attracting the wrong kinds of men.
Y’all know how it panned out: bad boy met girl, dated, broke up, bad boy went into a downward spiral of self-destruction, girl was seemingly oblivious blab la bla.

Occasionally, I received unexpected updates from random strangers about how my exes were travelling along. I was told that one of them in particular was not doing well.

They say “Never explain yourself; your friends don’t need it and your enemies never buy it.” I am about to break this rule.

Do I feel a little bit guilty for the fact that some of them are still not over me? To the extent that I contributed to the issue, i.e. I fell in love with them, sure, I take responsibility for that. I don’t think I forced them to love me, and I don’t want to apologise for being loveable. As such, sure, ok, I take responsibility to the extent of my role in that brief stint that we had together (yes, brief stint, because the maximum length of my failed relationships is 24 months. When you take into account that we have all lived for more than 20 years, 24 months is definitely not significant at all.).

Do I want to help them? If I can turn back time, sure. But last I check, I am not god yet, and I don’t have a time machine. So despite my desires to help in some helpful way, I don’t believe I have the capacity to do so. I don’t believe that meeting them and talking to them would yield any benefit whatsoever. I don’t believe explaining why we can’t be together would be beneficial at all. I think all of these are a waste of my time.

Whenever I get ex-related updates that are to the extent that they are not doing well, I gotta say I am not amused. My standard response is always the silent reply in my head, no wonder we broke up; you are incapable of taking responsibility for yourself, let alone a family unit. Yes, I just said that. That’s the whole point of a relationship: to create a family together eventually.

Dude, seriously. This is your life and the least you can do is to be responsible for the things you can control. Other people may and will hurt you. It’s up to you to respond to that, hopefully in a way that’s somewhat along the path of maturity.
[I debated long and hard before publishing this piece, for a variety of reasons. First, this is not a how-to on dating. This is also, to a certain degree, inappropriately labelled as "a case for dating", it is more like a one person's opinion on why dating a few people before settling down is encouraged (but that's too long for a title). There are also some ex-es that I am actually friends with, despite my earlier views on not believing on being friends with exes. So in other words, this is one heck of a controversial entry. In the end, I hit the publish button because well, I quite like it. And things like this are meant to be shared with the whole world, yes?]

[In the interest of full disclosure, yours truly is currently attached, i.e not single.]