Are there new rules now that technology has overrun our lives?  Do you still wait 3 days to call someone?  Do you like someone’s picture on Facebook?  Do you include them in a Snapchat?  Text has become our modus operandi.  Why?  It’s safe to reach out to someone over text and it’s so much easier to let them go over it.  Rejection is best served over emoji.  I like you, but as a friend.  Smiley emoji followed by heart followed by gun?  Actually, when my boyfriend called me for a date, I let it go to voicemail and texted him back because I panicked.  I texted him like a normal person who just happened to miss his call by chance.  The reality was that I was not comfortable with talking over the phone and texting gave me more time to craft my response.  For English-major nerds like me, this is the golden age of dating because I live for the written word.

We can be anyone we want. Appear to be witty.  Respond casually to show how much we don’t care.  And show how interested we are by what we put out in social media.  The dating inferences have just changed to digital.  In the past, we would actually just show up with our interest, but now, we can gauge each other’s interest by what we display on social media.  Did she just friend me accidently and then unfriend me?  Oh, yeah, you wants the D.  So our flirting is online.  Our interests are displayed online.  And our rejections are online.  And we can be harsh and unrelenting because the internet allows us to distance ourselves from actual people.  Now, people can end relationships by text and just erase their whole relationship picture by picture a la Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind.  But who do we really erase when we do this?

We’re always in the habit of presenting our best selves, so we are constantly editing the online versions of ourselves.  Sometimes, we erase whole stretches of time from our lives because we don’t want to be reminded of an ex.  This can be cathartic or hurtful, but it allows us to have more control of our lives and we want to protect these carefully curated versions of who we are.  Although we intrude our lives into media, we must be careful to not let media intrude on our lives.  What does that mean?  We are free to post and text what we want, but when it comes to actual moments, we should live them IRL, including the good and the bad, because when you look back, you don’t want to remember scenes where you dumped someone over text but in person.  In the digital age, these things are merely tools to enhance our lives and means to convey our thoughts, but they should not act as our avatars.

Through the centuries, the sexes have been embroiled in a war where guys can’t seem to understand what women want.  Women assume that men have the same thought patterns as we do and when men do not get the subtle hints we give them, we get mad.  We think we’re trying to so hard to put out clues for their benefit and are rubbed the wrong way when they don’t understand what we want.  Case in point, an acquaintance of mine went on a date with a guy where they were walking a trail.  Half-way through, she asked if he wanted to stop at a bench and sit.  He said that he wanted to keep going.  This is what is going on in our minds:

Women: Do you want to sit down? (so we can be close together and share the beautiful view.  I’d like you to put your arm around me and perhaps we can have a more intimate talk that is at a slower pace.

Men: No, I want to keep walking.  (No, I want to walking.)

That’s pretty much it.  We think that men think like us and that they should somehow know what we are implying and if they turn us down, it means they are turning our whole selves down and not just that one invitation.  Because of this, women will not contact a guy again.  This is what women want.  They want to feel wanted, and when their advances are rejected, they feel as if there is nothing there.  This does not mean women want to be ogled on the streets and fondled by every guy at the bar, but they want the guy they are interested in to want them.  So what do we do in this game?  Those who are in the know employ cold and hot tactics, seeing how the other reacts.  They flirt with someone else.  They ignore them.  We do all this to gauge how the other person feels without putting ourselves out there, but not all everyone know this.

Guys are not mind-readers, nor do they just automatically know what we are implying.  This can be quite confusing when it comes to potential intimate moments, when the protocol can be confusing.  Men are conditioned to accept a lady’s refusal because they are gentlemen, but at the same time, many women want him to push just a little further to show that he is interested.  What’s a guy to do?  You’re a creep if you do and you’re not interested if you don’t.  Here’s a good way for guys to approach this situation: ‘I respect you and your wishes and if you are saying no, I will honor that, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want you.’  And then leave.  What this does is put the ball in her court and she has to make the next move.

Ladies, even guys who are more socially-adept miss our cues.  And then, you get to the well-meaning guys who are a really good catch, but miss out on all the cues.  Please understand it is not because they are not interested, but because they don’t understand the whole dating game.  Even a suave guy will miss about 10% of your cues.  A regular guy will miss about 50%.  A guy who has barely dated will miss over 90%.  And what do we do?  We dismiss them because we think they are not intriguing because they can’t play the game, but the ones who know how to are the ones we are interested in because they leave us wanting more.  So we keep dating these guys and wonder where all the good guys are.

On one of our first dates, my boyfriend and I stopped at a food stand and he bought himself a hamburger but did not ask me if I wanted one.  I made fun of him years later for this and he said how was he to know that I wanted one, too?  If I wanted one, why didn’t I buy one myself or ask him to?  I told him it would’ve been rude of me to ask, but I thought he was incredibly rude to not even ask me.  I realized then that this guy who rarely dated before didn’t understand the social dating cues and it was not because he wasn’t interested in me, but because he just didn’t know.  If I didn’t know that, I may have stopped talking to him and then I wouldn’t have found out how great he was.  So the morale of the story is just because a guy can’t read what you’re trying to say doesn’t mean he’s not interested.

It takes a lot to get over someone you loved.  For me, what hurt the most were not the memories we shared, but the future I thought we would have together.  How does your heart stop loving just because your head tells you to?  I’ve had a few break ups and each one was devastating in their own right.  With the last one, I came to realize that I was tying my future with my boyfriends and staying with them because I thought we were somehow fated.  I know now fate is not how the cards are dealt, but how they lie.  Sometimes, we read too much of the future into our relationships and we see something that isn’t there, so we tell our friends ‘you don’t see what I see when it’s just us alone.’  And yet, that is exactly why we are blind, because we are stuck in this idea that we are fated to be with them if only we could pull through.

Day by day, it got easier after the break-up.  Eventually, I stopped loving him, something so alien to me when I thought my heart couldn’t take any more.  I learned to forgive each of them as human beings and old friends.  I could not hold it against them, for no one sets out to really hurt us.  They only hurt us through their clumsy attempts at love while still figuring out who they are.  However, I knew I could never forgive them as partners.  If you are contemplating the thought of getting back with them, ask yourself if you can truly forgive them.  If so, you must never bring up what caused the hurt again.  If you cannot, then you shouldn’t put yourself and them through that pain again. That’s the thing about forgiveness.  You can afford it to friends, but not partners because it would always loom in the relationship until it came out in an argument.  I can be friends with my exes, but I can never be in a relationship with them again.

And yet, I still found myself dreaming of them from time to time of the things left unsaid between us and the feelings that slowly waned but never died. They awakened like a phoenix with me in the morning sun and I felt that old, familiar fire once again. Yet I know that is all they are; merely dreams of a long-gone past with unresolved feelings. I tell him he has nothing to worry about for the sleeping me doesn’t remember the acts they committed to cause me such heartbreak. Perhaps heartbreak never really heals, but exists as a reminder of how fragile we are and how we would like to be treated and how we should treat others. Especially the ones we love.   Now I know I should enjoy relationships for what they are instead of what they can be.  I can live with the idea that there will always be a part of me missing because I left it with them, but they gave me part of them as well.

How do you find the person your soul is searching for and finally end up with them? You can increase your chances of meeting your soul mate if you find happiness in yourself.  When you are content, you will attract people who are also fulfilled within themselves.  Become the best version of yourself you can.  Let go of regret and fear and embrace what the future may bring, even if it is not what you intended.  Even if you do not find a soul mate, you will find someone who is healthy in their soul and mind as you are.  How do you become such a person?  Become a person that you love and are proud of.  Someone you would date.  Learn to care about yourself first before you can start to care about someone else.  Ideally, we would be a complete person before we start dating, but we are developing ourselves our whole lives, so we are incomplete people dating other incomplete people.  Just recognize that you are worth someone who is worthy of you.  That does not mean waiting forever for an imaginary white knight or lady, but a compatible person who gets your jokes, who worries about what time you’ll come home, and thinks about your futures together.

So does everyone marry their soulmate?  The answer is the vast majority of us will not.  We grow up with these notions that we should hold out for the right one or that there is one true person out there for us, and this is what hinders us in our search for a partner.  Sometimes, we do find this person whom we have immediate sparks with and it doesn’t work out, so we become bitter because we didn’t get what we thought we were promised.  We shouldn’t be searching for a soulmate, but a partner.  The word ‘soulmate’ has connotations of being this other half that completes us, and unfortunately, most people will fall short of this definition.  How can someone complete us if we don’t even know who we are?  Do we even have soulmates?  Yes, and if we are very lucky, we may even meet them.  Very few and far in between, we will end up marrying them.  Life does not always work the way we want, for we could meet our soul mate when we are both in our fifties and married to other people.  What do you do?  Are you able to break up two marriages to pursue true love?  What if your soul mate dies in an accident the very next day?  What if your soul mate isn’t ready to be in a relationship, which has nothing to do with you?

Oftentimes, we assign that word to people who are no longer in our lives because we feel a lost connection with them.  We idolize their memory and make them into something they never were, and as such, the current person we are with can never measure up to them.  Soulmates are real, but we are arbitrarily assigning that word to people we can’t be with because we have unresolved feelings towards them.  We have to recognize the importance of living in the moment of the relationship we are currently in.  See that it is a privilege to be with someone, but make sure you are secure in who you are, for if you are not, every relationship you have will deteriorate.  Mostly, you will find through your relationships who you are and what you are willing to accept and take.  Sometimes, the best thing we can find in the closure of a relationship is our strength.  We must learn to accept defeat, for we prolong bad relationships because we refuse to acknowledge that they are not working.  The defeat does not mean we failed, it only means we cared more about ourselves than a dying relationship.

If you are not happy with them, leave.  There is no need to prolong a relationship that will not last.  You are only keeping them from finding who they should be with or preventing them from growth.  Yes, they may mature into the person you always wanted them to be after the break up, but they would never be that person when you were with them because they had no incentive to change.  To break off a relationship is a hardship in and of itself, but that’s for another discussion.  We let the word ‘soulmate’ cloud our judgement and our hearts and we feel we are somehow cheated, so we become jaded because life will not give us what we want.  Let the word go, because we have built it into something it no longer means.  A soul mate is simply someone who we feel a deep connection with, but it does not always mean we will marry them.  First and foremost, the deepest relationship you will ever have is the one you have with yourself.  If you learn to enjoy who you are, respect your own boundaries, and love your insecurities, you will be able to protect and value this relationship first before any other.  And others will recognize this confidence you carry and be drawn to you because they see the value you place on yourself.  Perhaps this is the only soulmate you should worry about marrying: your own soul, because everything else will fall into place when you find your inner soulmate.