I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but don’t go on a date if you’re not excited

It sounds obvious, but sometimes we get desperate…

Dating can be frustrating.

Inevitably, when the matches get less frequent, and dates haven’t happened for a while, we start to lower our standards a bit.

We think — welllllll why not give this person a chance? We swipe on someone we wouldn’t normally on a good day, and we agree to dates just to see what happens.

Who knows? It could be love!

Except, in my experience, my gut feeling about someone is usually quite accurate. If I feel unsure about a date yet agree to meet someone because they seem nice enough, it’s never love. I always end the date with the same feeling I started with — that they’re just okay.

Maybe if we had met under different circumstances with more time for them to grow on me things could have been different. But the reality is that we met on a dating app, and the expectation since we matched is that there is mutual attraction already. So when it turns out to be one sided, it’s difficult to convince the other side that you need more time.

Re-reading my journal entries, I was reminded by how excited I felt when I was going on a first date with my last…