Dating: A Psychological Game

 Copyright © WD, 2023 All rights reserved.

Image credits to the right owner!

Mind you it's about dating, making an informed decision on whom to spend time with, how to spend time and how often, quite mechanical, very artificial. Because love my friend is beyond understanding and above our comprehension on things that fall into the buckets of right and wrong. It isn’t love at first sight, that look when you were mesmerized by someone, I assume that was for someone else, someone you did not tell, or maybe simply rejected yourself on their behalf. Dating is just with someone you were trying to match with, because they looked, felt or talked like someone you knew before or someone you met before. Sometimes over a quick Bumble chat, or sometimes over a Tinder swipe or maybe rarely the chance encounter that might happen while on a journey to different destinations or over a classy glass of wine.

The first encounter still has randomness, something that is not staged, because after it everything is a play, a beautifully curated version of every daydream we might have had of how things will turn out after the other person is found. It starts with wearing good clothes, if both parties are interested they will wear their best clothes whenever they meet, because as the social media world we live in has promoted and told us good dressing sense is must, guys love skin and short skirts so even before meeting the drool worthy photos on all the social platforms tag you as fashionista, girls love when a guy pairs his beige pants with a ivory blue knitted shirt and maybe an Air Jordan because its a show business and everyone loves the idea of a rich boyfriend. Dresses check, nails done, hair sleek or maybe left fluffy because a goofball golden retriever personality is on demand and to fake the personality with a good outer persona is a talent majority of us have learnt already. 

Now things become even more interesting, it's like a chess game. My next step is dependent on your next step. The end goal is to give you a checkmate where you fall in love and I decide that I am not good enough for you, or vise versa, harsh but simple. Moving around with an observant personality has given me a way to understand the mechanisms with which people work, then since I have oftentimes given ears to even some random people I have my own repository of what goes inside a person’s head at different situations. The acquired information also helps me make decisions at times as a wise man once said, “it's important to take lessons from other’s life, because ours is too short to try out everything”, and I try to abide by it. Now since the outer ambience is created the next cheat code is how well you talk, or rather gaslight and manipulate. One has to form a backstory, and strange but true somehow the majority of the people from this generation have a past. We all have secrets and parts of us that make us a little shady, something we haven't told the world and fear that if we let it out then we might not fit in. In recent years some warriors have come out (no offense) to project what they have been through, but honestly speaking for me in the world that is so fake I find it really hard to understand who has a real story and who’s is just a copy paste of multiple stories that float everyday. 

Every characteristic a person holds today has been tagged as a trauma response to something that happened to them in their life, the sadistic nature of this generation has made us feed on the response of trauma, trauma are part of life, they change a person, yes, but in my opinion it just makes us better, I believe if we really are taking lessons from our trauma which by the way is a great teacher as well we should just become more generous, we become a person to love more, even if it is done from afar, we become humble and start loving every second of life when we fight and come out of the trauma induced stress, insecurities, fear, guilt, hate and all other unsaid deep emotions. There will be people who won’t agree with my points and form opinions because that is what the world today is transformed into, to form opinions, being opinionated and being inflexibly biased are two different things that we have left on the media algorithms to decide for us. Don’t come at me if you don’t know my story, let me tell you a part of it.

Often the trauma is used as an option to gaslight as I mentioned before, I am not any better, I am just a human I realize things as I live life. I have had encounters in my past which have made me very conservative of the fact that who I let in my personal bubble physically or emotionally, recently while talking to someone I was genuinely interested in I understood that I am using my past as a shield to guard the fact that I was unsure about the two of us, I was using my trauma to justify my behavior that was purely because my mind knew things were not right and my heart decided to give chances, in that situation it clicked me, that yes I have a backstory that is dark, and I want to tell it to someone I look my future with but not because to justify my insecurities or my personality, but because I want to see how that person reacts to the information I give in. And that is not to test them but to develop an understanding. Trauma has made me cautious but I have decided not to give it the power to alter my personality. This world is fake, because I have seen people take scenarios from a fiction alter the main character as them and present to me the story, sometimes it's so good that finding out the reality becomes impossible and you fall in love with a curated character of a book lying somewhere in the fiction section of your college library. I remember a friend of mine had so many fights with me when I used to tell her about her boyfriend being fake, but poor girl he was her first boyfriend she wanted to make it work anyhow and ended up getting hurt in depression and with a load full of trauma, I hope the guy she is with now becomes her forever after, because I have seen two sides of her current boyfriend already, one where he was my best friend and one where he became just and acquaintance, he seems fairly genuine in both the ways of good for her!

The third and final part of Dating 101 course is to maintain the character you build, breakups are so often these days because humans are developing actors not ace in acting yet, they break character to their real self and switching back to the fictional character they made you see themselves as, the other person ends up confused, and as I mentioned in the second chapter “my next step depends on your next step” the other person breaks characters as well. 

Viola you see a breakup recipe made up!! Followed by breakup parties, self healing sessions, where people cry on cameras write stories and songs of betrayal get over it because they found someone fake again on a post breakup trek they were doing in Bali while connecting with nature and obviously posting every tiny detail of the progress as a story on Instagram because the validation is actual pill here.

Dating 101 ends here.

And I can just sigh, my vision of love is lost in movies and books written in early 1900s, where I barge into my love at my absolute low (that's another time story that the world we live in does not allow us to be vulnerable anymore) with important papers spilled on the floor because of the collision, where we see the moon at same time while we are apart and stay connected, where every nerve ending of my body craves for his touch, where pure love takes over the lust in our eyes, where people become the reason of other person smiling in his/her dream. Where we watch movies without the concept of “Netflix and Chill” and where the race to cover all bases does not ruin the pace of forming an unconditional understanding, admiration, respect, passion and love, a state of being purely in love for this life and every other life we live. I would rather stay as I am than to walk into the apocalypse the world around me has created.