Contributed by: Jet on Tuesday, August 28 2012 @ 09:17 am
Last modified on
Let’s imagine that you lived in a small village. The place to see and be seen is the town square. One day, someone catches your eye. Sadly, it doesn’t work out - that person is already interested in someone else. Undaunted, you try again. The next person is cold and clearly not interested. The third person is interested, but ultimately the relationship fizzles after three months. Disgusted, you declare, “I’m never going to date someone I meet in the town square ever again!”
Wait, what? The town square is the primary place to find people. You can’t very well go around knocking door-to-door, can you? Sure, you might run into someone at the fruit stand, or at the town well, but when people are there they tend to be focused on their errand, not on looking for a new love. Plus, there’s a village tradition that states that when someone single is in the town square, they wear a flower on their wrist. There’s no such code anywhere else in the village, so you might be wasting your time on someone who’s not just interested in someone else, they’re flat-out taken.
One might say, “Hey, the town square is not the problem. Everyone single shows up there; your job is to separate the good eggs from the bad. And clearly you’re doing something right, because you did enter a relationship; it didn’t work out in the end, but many relationships don’t, whether it’s a few months or a few decades. What makes the town square particularly culpable?”
The answer, of course, is that it’s not the fault of the town square, or even the environment the town square promotes. Neither is it usually the fault of an online dating site when someone enters a dry spell, or their relationship ultimately doesn’t pan out; however, it’s not unusual to hear someone declaring, “I’m never going to try online dating again!”
Now, sure, there are ways to can tailor your experience to your specific needs. Maybe the site you’re looking at isn’t really aimed at your interests or demographic, and a niche site would be a better fit. Maybe there simply aren’t a lot of people in your area who use the site, so it would be better to try somewhere else or broaden your search radius. And sometimes, whether you’re going to a site or a bar or the town square, you just hit a dry spell for no reason other than sheer bad luck.
But next time you’re ready to shoot the messenger, ask yourself: are you drawn to people who are inherently incompatible with you? Are you pursuing a relationship you’re not actually interested in, just because you want to end your dry spell? Are you choosing to see the glass as half empty, even though you’ve had quite a bit of interest, simply because you haven’t yet found a ‘happily ever after’?
You may just find that a little self-examination, while perhaps more difficult, will have far better results than a simple change in venue.