Couldn’t Be Me: Love is a game of uncertainty

Welcome to Couldn’t Be Me, a weekly advice column where I solicit your personal dilemmas and help out as best as I can. Have something I can help you with? Find me @_Zeets.

I think eventually all advice columns turn to dating advice. There are different kinds of love, and each is grand in its own way. It seems that since the beginning of time, people have been searching for the special romantic someone who they can spend the rest of their lives with. And for just as long, they’ve feared the prospect of ending up alone, or losing that perfect person once they’ve found them.

Some have tried to explain love away as a purely biological drive, which I find hilarious. The suggestion is that humans are unthinking animals driven by instinct, which goes against the notion of “I think, therefore I am.” Others have shunned love forever after being hurt by it, which then closes them off to one of the most wonderful parts of being alive.

That’s the essential problem with romantic love: it is such an incredible and yet dangerous experience that can elevate our lives and make the simplest experiences seem magical, and at the same time, make us feel the deepest levels of hurt.

As Emily Brontë once wrote:

Unconquered in my soul the Tyrant rules me still—

Life bows to my control, but Love I cannot kill!

There’s no fixed formula to finding love. Even with dating apps these days, the process is uncertain. This week, we try to address some of the fears that come with trying to find love, and how to keep love once you think you’ve found it.

Russell:

I’m dating a girl and we’re three weeks in, lost track of dates, it’s going very well, etc. I keep feeling the need to tell her how great of a time I’m having with her but I’m worried that (1) I’m just in a honeymoon-ish phase and (2) I would be over-committing or over-sharing by doing so and potentially scare her off with such a declaration.

Should I just let it ride, be happy spending time with someone I’m growing to really care about, and let the rest handle itself? Feels like that’s the smart thing to do but open communication about how I’m feeling also seems like a good idea.

CBM:

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the honeymoon phase. It’s a wonderful time in relationships and you should appreciate it as much as possible. But to not scare someone off, you just need to pay attention and talk to them about how much sharing they’re comfortable with.

Just as much as you want to tell her what a great time you’re having, you should also communicate with her to make sure that she’s having an equally great time, which is sometimes not the case. Make sure she is comfortable with how much you’re sharing so soon, or if she would prefer to take things slow. Then from that cue, you do what is necessary to make the relationship last.

In general, if there’s an open dialogue about how things are going, a relationship will proceed much better than trying to figure what the boundaries should be on your own.

Adam:

How did Arsenal end up on that top 10 expensive squads list, and also end up like they are?

CBM:

There’s a strong correlation to money spent and eventual league position over the years. And if you isolate the Premier League teams on that list, the list would go:

Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Arsenal.

That would put Arsenal in projected fifth place in the league, which is what their actual league position was last year.

But more important than money spent, is how well money was spent. Until semi-recently, Arsenal haven’t had a great track record of addressing serious needs. They took forever to address goalkeeper, and their lack of physicality and protection in midfield. Many times over the years, they’ve relied on the attack to bail them out, or they fell apart when facing an opponent that could put them under pressure.

Arsenal’s No. 1 problem for seemingly more than a decade now is defense. The curse of building the Emirates wasn’t the perpetual fourth-place finish, but the fact that, as Cesc Fabregas once said, the defense keeps making “schoolboy errors.”

Hopefully with the return of the two starting fullbacks there will be some stability there, but I’m at the point of thinking that the problem might not be the defenders themselves (though Arsenal have had a lot of awful ones over the years), but that whenever a defender comes to Arsenal, they inherit the Arsenal defender DNA that strips them of all cognitive function and physical capability.

Kinga:

Here is a question I have, should I delete Tinder? Is there any point to looking for love in that meat supermarket?

CBM:

Dating apps like Tinder open up the landscape of dating by making an incredible number of potential partners available, but in doing so they can make the process feel like a video game, exacerbating some of the worst qualities in humans.

People say wild shit on Tinder that they would never say in real life. Because they have so many options, and can entertain so many people at once, they have hardly any drive to focus on one individual. The app capitalizes on the anxious feeling that there’s always someone better on the horizon, so users are always comparing the quality of their matches — just as you might in real life, but with greater ease on a more impersonal stage.

And because dating apps give you so many options, the game is played primarily on looks. Attractiveness is an important factor in dating, but it is also defined by more than a partner’s physical qualities. Dating apps can make it difficult to gauge an individual’s personality. They demean the chemistry of human relationships, and can turn dating into a quest to have sex with the hottest people possible. If you’re looking for something more than that, you may have to wade through a lot of nonsense before you finally match with another person who is compatible with you. It’s a tough game to play.

But I think if you do have the patience for it, dating apps can be fruitful, too. You will certainly meet a lot of people, and they do help you know quickly whether you should progress with someone. You can find out right away if someone is an asshole, rather than months into the relationship.

And you can move on more quickly, rather than spend time out at bars (or wherever) going through the same process again and again. Apps are much more cost-efficient, to say the least.