Love is often portrayed as the best thing in this world. Your family might be fighting all the time, your career isn’t going as planned, your friends turn out to be back-stabbing monsters, but it seems like love will always be there to save your day. Well, tough luck. Finding love isn’t always as easy and effortless as it seems in the movies. Not only that, but when you do find love, it isn’t always mutual. If it is mutual, it doesn’t last forever, like Hollywood would have us believe. The path to finding true love is hard and treacherous and at some point it makes us think it’s never going to happen for us. Let’s talk about all those things that can turn you into a pessimist about love.
1. Ghosting
Ghosting sucks, ok? But it’s also quite common these days and there’s nothing we can do about it. It blows that some people choose to just disappear on you one day, when before that everything seemed to be going pretty well. But alas, that’s the world we live in right now. People aren’t comfortable with rejection anymore, they don’t really want to go through the trouble of having that conversations that starts with “we have to talk” and ends with “I’m sorry, it’s not you, it’s me”. Ghosting is easier, it’s less personal, so that’s what we get these days.
2. Lying
Dating seems like a pretty straightforward thing. You can either be exclusive and only see each other. Or you can be not exclusive, in which case both of you know that you have your options open and you both can see other people. Most are ok with that. It seems fair, right? But for some reason people still lie. They say they’re dating only with you, when really they’re seeing other people behind you back. Oh the lies they tell, they’re so bad a kid would be able to see through them.
3. Benching
Benching, in case you don’t know, is when you put a relationship on hold, in order to pursue someone else. So basically you’re too chicken to dump someone, in case it doesn’t work out with the other person, so you keep them waiting, knowing that you can always come back to them. Being benched is the worst, it’s like you’re good enough to be safe option, but not good enough to be the only one.
4. Ignoring
Since most of our communication these days happens through the phone and not face to face, it’s really easy to ignore people. You can just not pick up the phone, ignore texts for days or just simply block the person. And while it’s sort of convenient to do that, it really sucks being on the receiving end of that kind of behavior.
5. Negging
Negging is no joke, it’s basically emotional manipulation. All those backhanded compliments do is undermine our confidence and make us want to seek approval. And whether a person you’re seeing is aware of what they’re doing or not – it’s absolutely unacceptable.
6. Breadcrumbing
This term might be new to you, but once you figure out what it means you’ll be like “yup, I’ve been there”. Breadcrumbing basically means leaving a trail of texts that keeps you hoping for more. It’s a way to keep someone interested, without putting a lot of effort into it. So if you’re receiving flirtatious texts from someone once in a blue moon, they’re probably breadcrumbing you in order to keep you interested and boost their own ego.
7. The “I’m Not Looking For Anything Serious”
We’ve all heard that one before, but it never fails to provoke an eyeroll. I mean, it’s the oldest line in the world. Of course you’re not looking for anything serious, unless it’s a supermodel with perfect proportions. Is that meant to make us feel good that even though you’re not looking for anything serious you’re still up for a round of bedroom aerobics with us? Ugh.
