Quietly Brave: A Social Anxiety Memoir

♡ Dating Pt 1 - First Date Disasters ♡

While I'm on the topic of things that give me anxiety, dating is a significant cause of anxiety for me.

Is dating stressful for you, too? Or atleast a confusing process?

There's so much pressure to find the perfect partner and start a family.

When my mum was twenty-two, she was engaged. When my grandmother was twenty-two she was pregnant with my mum.

Now I'm twenty seven and my love life may as well be the Sahara....completely deserted. Like a lone tumbleweed slowly blowing down an empty road.

With all my friends in relationships and having my fair share of 3rd wheeling, I wanted to have a boyfriend.

So at the end of 2019 after Christmas (and before the global pandemic hit), I made the brave decision to sign up on a paid dating site. Sort of genuis on my part because it was before social isolation and lockdown hit all of us. It was unknowingly my last social hurrah.

I wanted to go on dates to:

1. Get over my social phobia

but also:

2. Potentially meet a really great guy.

I had a couple of good dates.

Let's not talk about the good dates. Let's spill the tea (that you still hopefully have in your hand) and talk about the bad dates. The dates where my social anxiety became apparent. The dates where I would learn some really hard - but much needed- life lessons.

HOW ROMANTIC LOVE IS PORTRAYED IN BOOKS & MEDIA

I always had this idea from fantasy quests & rom coms that a guy would sweep me off my feet and I would be happy in love and happy in life overall. One of the downsides of growing up with a novel in my hand was that I thought relationships looked so perfect in books. The two main characters would bump into each other and instantly fall in love and live happily ever after. Or atleast a fiery enemies-to-lovers arc.

Stupidly, I thought love in real life would be like that too. I thought I'd feel this firework spark and feel like I was meeting the other half of my soul. I thought love would be the perfect fix. The tranquility and support given by someone else would keep the anxiety at bay; the metaphorical anchor to the tumultuous waves that were my mind.

Someone would walk into my life and make it better. I would be happy and all my problems would then be so minor and my self-esteem and self worth would be reaffirmed. Finally someone liked me! I could start to build on myself, build on my confidence and go on adventures together and explore the world. Surely everything else would fade into the background and all the things that I thought would be difficult would be easier to tackle now that I had someone else by my side. A partner in crime. The other half of me. The yin to my yang. The Batman to my Robin.

You see the problem with my thinking, right?

It's so important to build your own life first, build on your confidence, go on adventures and reassure yourself, not seek reassurance and confirmation from others.

Two particular dates come to mind. They taught me two very important life lessons.

DATING LIFE LESSON 1: ACCEPT REJECTION AND SOLDIER ON

[First date with a guy I barely knew]

Okay, it's story time. This won't be a happy one. Sorry I know I said this book was going to be a comedy.

I had a date with a guy. No, this isn't the part where you laugh.

After talking to this guy on the phone for probably a week, he sounded nice and it made me even more anxious. I liked him. Okay, let's give him a generic name for anonymity purposes; okay Bob.