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In any city or area filled to the brim with sights to visit, careers to build, homes to make, and lives to live, it can feel like anything in the world is possible while also feeling like nothing in it could remain still long enough in order for you to fully enjoy it.
San Francisco is an example of this experience: the world keeps moving, it looks beautiful, but can you truly find yourself being able to remain still to enjoy the more subtle things around you? The variety of people that you can meet here is immense, it’s amazing, but how many of us could actually take the adequate amount of time from our daily routines to invest in dating, into looking for someone?
Whether it’s for the long-term, or just simply for some friendly company in navigating what the city and Bay Area has to offer, the art of dating in San Francisco in such a bustling community can be tricky at times. For example, as mentioned earlier, the people that you might be interested in might be more interested in building up their careers, devoting their focus day in and day out to the work that they do in such a way that looking for someone would only be a distraction from their personal goals. Everyone has their own goals that they want to achieve in their lifetimes, but if your goal is to find someone, and the goal of the potential person that you’re interested in might solely be that of building up and advancing their professional careers, the odds of the both of your goals being able to complement one another is very tricky, and you might find yourself spending unnecessary energy on someone who just isn’t looking for anything at this exact moment, and it happens in a city.
Another difficulty that one might face trying to date in a place like San Francisco is that due to such a unique collection of people that thrive within the community, that it becomes easy to doubt both yourself and the person that you’re interested in, because you feel that there could be someone who is a ‘better option’ for you, a ‘better option’ to the person that you’re currently trying to talk to — and once you begin to meditate on that idea more and more as you navigate the dating scene, it becomes difficult to want to establish a commitment to one person, resulting into a potential friends with benefits, non-commitment relationship, because you or the other person feels that there could be someone better for them out here in the city, and with dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, it feels like you have all of those potential partners in the literal palm of your hand. It’s this mix of unique personalities with more or less easy accessibility through dating apps that makes the journey of dating in such an environment even trickier.
Even though it might feel confusing and uncertain at times, if you approach the search for other people as friends first before anything romantic, the dating scene becomes less of a hassle, less of a hunt, and more of a large playground to meet new friends and run around exploring with, if you embrace that mindset of looking for a person that you enjoy as a friend and companion as opposed to someone that you’re immediately seeking as a potential long-term partner — the stress and tension is lesser, the sense of immense obligation is lesser, and so the both of you feel more comfortable in not having to impress one another, you can simply be two friends enjoying the day and what the city has to offer. And, perhaps, after a while, you might enjoy one another’s company so much that the idea of a relationship might not sound too strange as it once might have sounded.
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Previously published on luvidya.com.
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Photo: Pexels