How Long Does it Take to Meet a Good Partner?

When I started dating, I thought I'd get on there, find a guy, and ride off into the sunset. 

AfterI'd been on the dating scene for about nine months, all the usual stuff happened to me. I got ghosted. I saw all the weird-looking profiles. There were the guys who tell you all these glorious things and you think a future is actually going to happen, but it doesn't. I had all the ups and downs on the dating apps. Nine or ten months in, I realized what I was doing wasn't working. 

I obviously had no idea how to do this. So I took a step back and thought, what if I did this more holistically? What if I wasn't just trying to find a partner, but figuring out how to create community, how to socialize, how to date the way we encourage teenagers to – not thinking about getting married, just dating and having fun and going out.

I decided that approach might take me five years to find someone I wanted to settle down with. My environment didn't appear to have a lot of like-minded people. That wasn’t true, but when you’re dating, it looks that way. So I said, okay, considering those odds, let's just give it five years. That really helped me release my attachment to the outcome - without giving up.

I was still dating, still active, but it was so much more relaxed. When I matched with someone on the dating apps, the thought that I might marry that person stopped being the focus. I stopped thinking about them as a potential spouse. I was like, this is just someone I'm going to have a very fun date with.

I started planning my own dates ahead of time. I had a running list of places I wanted to go in St. Louis – it's a really fun city with a lot of great places. When I matched with someone who wanted to go out, I was happy to suggest something I wanted to do, a restaurant I wanted to try. Once I relaxed into that, dating became a whole lot more fun.

Weirdly, I became better at it because I wasn't relying on the men to move the dates forward or do anything. I was just having a ball. And because I was having a ball, I was better at it – meeting more people faster, getting to first dates faster.

Instead of the five-year time budget, It took me only six months after the shift to meet my partner. I was on the dating scene for about 18 months which isn’t bad, considering everything.