Single and Ready to Mingle?

A male friend of mine recently asked me to write about how difficult it is to meet women after college.  Let’s be honest, isn’t it more difficult for all of us to meet someone special after college?  For the most part, the days of hooking up with some random from the bar while your roommate is sleeping two feet away are long gone for most of us.

As we get older, our options tend to decrease.  People get married off and the “bar hoppers” get younger and younger.  The last three guys I met in a bar turned out to be under the age of 22.  This is definitely a problem.  Back in college, it was easy to go out to a bar, meet a cute guy (or girl) and take them home.  Throw them a dollar for the bus in the morning, or sooner, and you’re on your way.  Now, things are more complicated.  Not only have we become the “old people” in the bar but everyone has baggage now.  The people we meet are divorced or have children.  Living on Long Island, you have to worry about who still lives with their parents.  It’s not as easy as just thinking someone’s cute anymore.

On top of all of the complications we already have, technology only complicates things further.  With constant text messaging and updates from Twitter and Facebook coming straight to our phones, we’ve become unable to focus on what’s right in front of us.  Something “better” might text us at any second.

Dating has come a long way from when our parents were looking for love.  We’re no longer limited to marrying our high school sweetheart or waiting to run into the right guy while out running errands.  If you’re lucky enough to find the love of your life in high school, you’ve won the jackpot, but it doesn’t happen that way for most of us.  In addition to the tried and true methods of meeting someone in a bar or on line at Starbucks, we’ve gotten more creative.  We have Facebook, Match.com, Plenty of Fish, eHarmony, speed dating and there’s even an app for your iPhone that tells you where the nearest gay men are (for those of you who swing that way).

With all of these options, it seems like it should be easier for us to find that person we can’t live without.  All of these extra options, though, means there’s that much more to distract us.  It isn’t so easy to recognize and appreciate the wonderful person that we have when there are a hundred others out there, distracting us every second of the day.  How often do we even take the time to really get to know the people that we meet, anyway?  We’re too busy checking text messages while out on a date, juggling the competition and we just don’t take the time anymore to really get to know each other.  The first date I went on after Doc and I broke up lasted about three hours.  In all that time, my date only asked me one question about myself.

With thirty being the new twenty and people getting married later in life, is it really because we’re focused on developing our character and chasing our dreams, or is it just that we don’t pay any real attention to the people in our lives?  Its one hundred percent possible that I’ve met the man of my dreams already, we’ve just been too busy exploring all the options to figure it out.  Next time you meet someone who shows some promise, turn off your cell phone while you’re getting to know them.  Ask them questions about themselves, get to know what they’re all about and don’t be so quick to say “on to the next.”  It’s completely possible that we’ve already met the person that we could be happy with, we’re just too busy looking for something else to even notice.  Maybe it isn’t as difficult to meet someone as we think it is, we just need to open our eyes a little more.

“Drinking our cheap bottles of wine Sit talking up all night Saying things we haven’t for a while Smiling but we’re close to tears Even after all these years We just now got the feeling that we’re meeting For the first time”  For the First Time ~ The Script