Ain't No Walk in the Park

So this might have taken me a bit longer than most people, but after years of dating, I have established something.

Dating is hard.

You can spend months with Mrs. Perfect on Paper only to discover she's in love with someone else, which is totally o.k., because you only dated her because your friends told you how perfect she was. But now you've wasted all those months where you could have dated Mrs. ACTUALLY Perfect.

You could spend a year dating the wrong sort of guys and then date the right sort of guy, only to have them swept away with graduate studies.

You will spend countless minutes on the worst date of your life praying that the girl across the table will morph into the last girl you dated, because she was perfect and this girl can't seem to keep her mouth closed while she's eating.

The question is how can we take this crazy world of dating and make it into something positive, where everyone comes out with the love of their life?

It's difficult to say, because a huge hinderance in dating someone you don't know, i.e. the majority of people you will date, is that you don't know them. That's the whole process. Even if you've dated them for two months, you still don't know the reason to why all of the sudden they seem like hell on wheels.

And this is where the majority of early, promising relationships fail. Lack of Communication.

And you're thinking, but I talked to her all the time!
Yeah, but did you ask about her day? Did you ask why they seemed to be pissy? You have no way of knowing unless you ask. Without the ability to honestly and openly communicate with your interest, you'll be losing the most important building block of a healthy relationship.

A while back, I went through hell. My closest friends were the only people who really knew, aside from my family, and all the ladies at my mother's office (gotta love her). I, also, happened to also be dating someone at the time. The guy's lack of compassion or curiosity for my own plight, while I had been nothing but supportive for his constantly-consistently-high-levels of stress, doomed the relationship from the first moment my uncle decided I needed a taser. (I did not tase the guy I was dating, but Oh yes, my life got ugly).

Now I'm not saying that you're supposed to lean on the person you're dating for all your emotional support and needs, because early on in a dating relationship that's more annoying than necessary, but being able to talk about the big struggles in your life as they occur, allows bonds to be formed between the two of you.

So the moral of the story is this. IF you want to make a relationship work. If you are tired of being single and think, just maybe this one here, the one I'm dating now, could be a great relationship, remember this. IF YOU DON"T COMMUNICATE, If you don't make an effort towards learning about the person and attempt to establish a healthy communicative partnership where you share hopes, dreams, struggles, and life; you're dooming yourself to go through the entire process again.