So the slow food movement is an effort to get people to stop eating fast food and to eat healthy and locally sourced food. But what does that have to do with dating and love?
Let’s consider how we date these days. We pull up the fast food menu of the say…oops I mean dating app of the day. We browse through the options and quickly decide using a photo or two, whether to select that date of the minute.
If you’re lucky someone actually reads what you wrote. But we know dating apps often fail us.
The swipe culture alone creates a toxic tone for how we interact with each other. We become commodities of the internet at that point, equivalent to the candy store of the dating world. Many people have dozens if not hundreds of matches. How can we actually choose someone when we’ve matched with so many? Truth is, we probably can’t.
Dig deeper and once a few matches are made we hopefully have a few dates. But, are we really connecting? Are we being present with that person or just waiting to jump onto the next date or into bed with this one?
Going too fast can build a house of cards often built on lust and fantasy and we often burn out…fast. Our chemicals run string like pushing the nitro button on a fast car. We forget everything and everyone who came before this person. Then as fast as it started. It ends. How did you miss that brick wall in front of you before? That’s fast love.
Living in a major city I often find myself wishing I lived in a small town, you know where you maybe have 20 options, you find the best fit and ride down the street on a float in the annual town anniversary celebration. Maybe a little extreme, but you can create a small town through a slow love approach to dating.
I’m honestly in it for the long run at this point. So, I don’t mind going slow. I remember the anticipation in high school of the next date, the long phone calls during X Files and some making out in my driveway, hoping my parents were asleep. While I’m way past high school these days, there was a powerful foundation built on that kind of slow love. But, what does that look like? How do we slow down our ADHD-ish minds around fast dating?
Image by Rene Rauschenberger from Pixabay
Tips For Slow Love:
- Slow the swipe. Read the dating profiles and see if you could actually get along with the person. Find something that really draws you in.
- Limit sex talk before meeting them. Very few people want to hear about your d%ck size or how you’d rip their clothes off and take them in the back of your Chevy truck before you even meet them. Control your impulses a bit.
- Consider the one at a time approach to dating. The only way to get deep enough with someone is to get to know them. When you’re dating a few people this is hard — because we are all actually bad at multi tasking.
- Explore their mind and heart before you explore their body. It’s so easy to get excited about your connection with another person. But much like a good wine, the sex will be even better if you ease into it and have a deep connection. Imagine having a friend and lover. (Cue Michael Bolton)
- Maintain your own hobbies and activities. Doing so also reduces the chances of any resentment towards your partner.
- Just enjoy them. Every moment. Because we don’t get time back.
~By a recovering Fast Love dater.
Follow my writing at Dating Mindfully
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This post was previously published on Hello, Love.
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