How To Stop Feeling Anxious About Dating

FLESH GAMES

Anxiety is part of dating.

This is normal.

Smartphones complicated the communication of relationships to a point that people do not want relationships anymore.

Before 2008, there was little information one could acquire about someone they were involved with romantically without being face-to-face and directly interacting to learn the information.

Our real lives and online lives have crossed. We’re living weird mirror AI lives in our phones, living real lives on our feet with the phones put away. But when is our phone put away? When are we not thinking about our online lives and who is interacting with us there?

We are having too much romantic interaction with each other online.
Not enough interactions offline.
The split is making us insane.

This anxiety has escalated to the point that we are not only feeling the pressure to be perfect in real life, we are feeling even more pressure to perform on our smartphones.

The worst development with dating and the smartphone is the texting and collecting of situationships. Let’s just call situationships—acquaintances of the flesh...

My get-togethers with friends are a re-hash of all the stupid things our Acquaintances of the Flesh have done:

“He set a date and ghosted me.”
The friend complaining talks to this guy again with no consequences for the ghosting. I say it’s because we have smartphones diluting humanity. This was not even possible when people were calling landlines for dates. Being stood up physically was rare the the only equivalent.

”She says all these great things on text—loving, caring, but nothing in person. It’s been a year of this.”
But you keep going back because you like the texts and the phone relationship is enough? Oof. Y’all wasted a year on this person because your phone is telling you things? The person IRL is MID? Fuck this.

”I think they are texting other people when we are in bed together, but I guess we are not exclusive."
They're *doing what* in bed with you? You’re both open to dating other people, but surely not when you are in bed together??

This shit needs to stop.

I’m here to give you tips on how to handle dating, stay balanced, and be in the drivers seat in 2025. Buckle up.