Member-only story
The Fear Of Quitting Dating
We don’t have to believe in BS forever.
We were raised in Quitter Culture, where quitters were failures, not tough enough to finish. The destination was all that mattered, who cares how much we endured on the journey. The end result is what they’ll remember you for, right? If you quit, all they’ll remember is that you “gave up.” Self protection, self worth, and the idea that maybe suffering to make other people happy isn’t a badge of honor weren’t available to us when we hated playing the violin or soccer, when we spent our development years doing something we despised in order to satisfy others, to avoid them shaming us by calling us quitters. This is when we learned to keep going no matter what. This is one of the reasons it’s so hard for single people to simply stop chasing, searching, and dating.
I think Quitter Culture did a lot to us, but more than anything it kept us focused on what other people thought, rather than how we actually felt or what we were experiencing. Ever wonder where your (entirely understandable) focus on the opinions of others came from? I think this is one of the places. I think giving up a devotion to what other people think is a difficult thing to do because we’ve been doing it for so fucking long. If you’re single and you’ve been searching for a partner fruitlessly for years on end, enduring all the harms our modern dating culture has to…
