Dating Advice From A Vastly Under Qualified Teenager: Part 2

Drinking coffee, home alone, it’s time for part two.

A lot of the dating advice I find is kind of totally fucked up. I mean, you go to Cosmo magazine, and pretty much all of the advice is directed from the viewpoint of a woman. You go to the male equivalent of Cosmo (is there even one?) and the advice is pretty much gender specific to men. Now, this would seem like a normal thing to do, except for two things. Firstly, this is really bad advice from really shallow people. Secondly, these advice columns ignore a huge amount of people. Of course they would have thought they had all their bases covered. But no. They left out pretty much everybody who doesn’t fit within male-female gender roles. I’m not going to explain how gender roles and gender identity works, I’ll let Hank Green explain instead.

So, with this more functional advice, I will instead try to be as gender neutral as possible and not give advice from a male/female gender perspective. Because everybody deserves to be loved and everybody deserves my expert advice, and this post would be way too long if I was gender role specific. But I will be talking about relationships between two people, because Polyamory is just not my field, man.

Anyway, enough lead in.

Let’s get started.

Picking up where we left off in part 1, communication with the person you are in a relationship with, is beyond important. How the two of you communicate may come to change everything about the relationship. If you have something on your mind, why are you in a relationship with someone if you can’t talk to them about it? Even when the thing on your mind is about the relationship.

Don’t take your partner for granted. It’s really easy to do this, but it’s pretty much essential to the relationship that you appreciate the person you’re in a relationship with, fully. And what I’m talking about is getting out of your head, stop thinking about the relationship, and be present. A thing that a lot of people do, is think of their partner as an extension of themselves. This happens a lot in very close relationships, it’s like you know each other so well, that you almost assume that they don’t have anything to say. It’s important to remember that this person you are in a relationship with, is totally different from you. They have a completely different life story than you do. There are things that they fear, things that they love, things that you would have never guessed about them. Just because you are in a close relationship, does NOT mean that you know everything about them. Your goal is to find out those things. Take them for  granted and you’ll never know.

Never separate yourself from your partner for stupid reasons. It doesn’t matter if they’re from money and you grew up in the ghetto, or if they’ve slept with a lot of people and you haven’t. It doesn’t matter. If you distinguish yourself from them in negative ways, it’ll get mixed into the relationship dynamic and fuck things up. Turbulence.

This post is getting pretty long, so this will be my last piece of advice. All of these things are important, I didn’t save the best for last, this is as important as all my other pieces of advice.

Break up if you have to. Because relationships that aren’t making you happy aren’t worth being in. There is no excuse to be in a relationship that you don’t like (aside from green card marriages ‘n shit). And while in our society, breakups are looked at as bad things, some relationships are meant to end. And you shouldn’t be scared of ending them if they don’t make you happy.

And this concludes my dating advice series. Good job on reading the whole thing. I’m actually impressed. I’m going to go look at pictures of my girlfriend and wish she wasn’t in Spain.

-A

Dating Advice From A Vastly Under Qualified Teenager: Part 1

So I’ve decided to do a post about relationships. This isn’t an argument, this isn’t an essay. This is advice about relationships from one extremely naive teenager to a bunch of people who may or may not know him. I’m not going to use lists, I’m not going to be thorough, and I’m definitely going to leave gaps in my logic. But at least it’ll be real and not some bullshit that I came up with because I had nothing better. So here we go. Consider this the lead in.

There is no prince charming out there for you.
There is no Victoria’s Secret Model out there for you.
There is no person out there for you, who will magically whip you into a relationship that is immediately perfect and constantly ideal. If you believe these things, consider yourself lied to, because Hollywood is addicted to that idea and is holding onto it with a death grip. If a relationship is built quickly, it’ll end quickly. I’m not saying that true love isn’t possible, it’s very possible, and very real and lots of people feel it. It just doesn’t look like most people think it looks. Long lasting relationships are built. They’re not held together by this magical force that keeps everything working properly. They’re built. They take time. They take effort and sometimes they just don’t work. But magically waiting for love to happen isn’t how it works.

Relationships exist on a sloped plane of truthfulness. And in my opinion, they only last if they’re on either end. Some relationships that turn into marriages, are so filled with lie upon lie that it forms this kind of pile. On top of this pile of layered lies, sit the two people in the relationship, but the lies also forms a wall between them. The pile and the wall of lies gets bigger every time something goes unsaid. And eventually the wall gets so thick you don’t know who you’re married to anymore.

And on the other end of this plane, is the end where the two people in the relationship, (or more, if that’s how you roll) are completely open with each other. It’s easy to talk about stuff. Life is simple. A lot of relationships start at this point. But at both ends of the plane, things start to drift towards the middle. And that’s why I say that relationships only last if they stay on either end. Because if they drift towards the middle, which they do a lot of, mind you, things get turbulent. And nobody likes that adjective being used to describe a relationship. Especially  when you’re the one in it.

Fuck. I knew I’d ramble.

All the advice I’m trying to give, is that you have to be really conscious and honest about a lot of the stuff you do in a relationship. More importantly, really conscious and honest about the things you think. If there’s a mis-communication between you two, it’s because there’s a difference in thinking.

Which is why functional couples do things like talking and spending time not thinking about sex constantly. I’ll give more functional advice in Part 2.

In the short time between this post and Part two, I want you to remember something very important.

-A