Relationships

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded Tinder (unofficial client for Windows Phone because Windows Phone has no apps still). As with most things having to do with relationships I didn’t know why I decided to download it. From what I heard about Tinder people find it a joke. Many guys I know employ #teamswiperight (also some girls too). I was a little confused on that part because I though you would only want to message people you are interested in. Because of this I set a couple of rules on to who I would swipe right to, here are the two main ones:

  1. You must have a description
  2. Your description must be “interesting”

For different people I employed different rules, I was nowhere near objective. I didn’t really use the app much, just right before going to bed every couple of nights during the summer after I recovered from my surgery and went back to work. A couple weeks in I had not received any matches. Well no big deal right? It’s not like anybody takes Tinder seriously anyway. It’s a big joke, right?

Attraction to a group of people isn’t something that is learned. It’s hard wired. Your body just somehow knows what it is attracted to. People may disagree on what you are attracted to but that isn’t the point of this post. At 14 I actually realized why I liked girls. It kind of slapped me in the face like most realizations I have way later than most other people. From then on I have had to endure, like most other people, the awkward “I like you, do you like me” routine. Since 14 I have only liked about 7 girls total. Why? I don’t really know, with most things nobody really taught me anything about relationships. All the knowledge I have acquired so far is from awkward interactions with no real success. Clearly it’s a skill that is picked up through social interaction but I’m not very good at that either. (This weekend at a party I left because I was too nervous to talk to people I didn’t know, this is a normal occurrence).

This post could have been written maybe 3 or 4 different times over the past 9 months of my blog and probably could have been written a couple times more before I started blogging. I just didn’t know the right way to formulate a blog post about relationships, it’s something I have no experience in so I have no basis for my thoughts. What prompted this was on Saturday when I used Tinder again for the first time in like 2 weeks. I felt bad because I didn’t use Tinder to find people I was interested in I just used it to judge people. I judge many things but I didn’t feel right in judging people who probably have multifaceted lives that a short description and a couple of pictures on an app cannot possibly describe.

It’s hard to be self critical and self analyze, you never want to be your own worst enemy but sometimes you have to be to find the greatest change. I self reflect almost all the time. Probably way too much. I go over things in my head and over analyze a lot of the time. One thing I’ve done this for is to try to find who I am. If you had to say who you are in a word, a couple of sentences, a speech, a year, a lifetime what would you say. What would you do that would define who you are. Right now I’ve settled on programming, video games, and longboarding (I think I’m pretty shit at longboarding though). The third item on my list has changed every couple years, programming and video games are constant till the end of time…hopefully.

A relationship can be an important part of someone’s life. Usually it is one of the most important parts of somebody’s life, having somebody else that means so much to you is something I would love to be able to experience one day. However it isn’t guaranteed, nothing in life is. Relationships (the I like like you ones) take many forms and are all part of “the human experience”. Some relationships are very inconsequential and only come up when needed and some make up the entirety of a person’s being. For me I feel like I still need to work on myself before I can try to branch out to try other things, like being in a relationship, finding a girlfriend, or meeting somebody I want to spend my entire life with.

I’m only 20. I hopefully have a lot of time left to experience whatever life is and that includes relationships. However I’m already 20 and I have had no experience in a relationship. It’s similar to other questions people ask themselves. “I haven’t had a boyfriend for more than 3 months”, “I’ve been in one relationship for 4 years and now I’m single again”, it’s mainly fueled by the desire to not be alone. Yeah, there are close friends and family but there is a human desire to find somebody else in life. Right now I’m in the “if it happens, it happens boat” but I may need to be more proactive if I actually want a relationship any time soon. I never actually know what I want though. It took me “9 months” to release an app.

With most blog posts I try to either comment on things I notice or observe in the world or I just post about what has been going on in my life. This I think is the first post based upon more personal feelings which may be really weird. This was also another reason I kind of held off on making a relationship based post. My blog isn’t a diary, it’s a blog so not all my personal feelings and emotions can come out on a public stage. However I still think it’s important to at least try to analyze everything that goes on in my life. Whether it be going to PAX, having major spinal surgery, or looking at relationships. Basically I’m weird and still learning a lot about “life” but that’s OK, everything will be OK.