Listen, dating is a massive sinkhole that only widens everyday sweeping poor unsuspecting suckers into its stupid, shallow hole. Modern dating is a rude process and I find myself being just as rude right back to it. As I found myself texting a potential (love interest, sex partner who knows…) informing him that I was bored with the back and forth texting process, I realized that I just need to take a step back. It’s hard for me to be nice anymore when I feel my time is being wasted.

Talking

I love being black, contrary to the belief of those who judge me based on the way I talk and the fact I have white friends and I love hummus. I’ve been so clear about my love for slang talking, Hennessey drinking, too hardcore to ever be shorts-wearing black men– but with that love comes some stipulations. Sorry I have to say this, but sometimes I hate that we have to be so fucking cool we have to have a separate word or phrase for EVERYTHING. We don’t casually date, we “talk”. What the hell does that even mean?! I get swept up in the culture and terminology time and time again. I remember having the defining the relationship ( or as I call it the “Wtf are we doing”) conversation with a man and I got so distracted by the sound of his voice and the look of his smooth, brown full lips as they uttered the words, “Yeah, I fuck with you.” The way my heart skipped a beat you would have thought this nigga proposed! What he did was blurt out a meaningless phrase that I can’t dare question for fear of officially losing my black card. I fuck with my Ramen noodles for lunch every day and we are not in a romantic relationship– I need some clarification, dude.

If our cultural mating rituals were being observed on the national geographic I feel like the narrator would fall asleep because nothing would even begin to move for several months. He would then be awakened screaming, ” Holy shit, they’re mating! I didn’t see that coming– they hardly knew each other. That escalated quickly….”  Things do happen too fast because the “talking” process is long as it is empty. It consists of weeks and weeks of texting with no continuous conversation or face- time. Listen, fuck your texts I want your soul! I could care less if your day was “good”, I want to know what made it so and I want to at least hear your voice explaining it, if I can’t physically see you breathing, blinking, moving–alive! I operate almost solely off vibe, on top of the fact that I’m a weird girl and my personality does not translate via text at all. I just wonder if maybe I’m getting too old for this runaround. Or maybe I’m the kid with ADHD that always needs some sort of action to be going on for me to feel adequately stimulated while everyone else is so laidback.

I’m Focused, Man

I did have one guy say to me that he feels like it’s a lot of pressure on the man because the woman sometimes becomes too focused on him. Hey, sir listen up. I’m a full time employee, single mom with a writing hobby– I’m looking to do most shit as efficiently and expeditiously as possible– including trying to determine your depth and eliminate you if you have none. Let me see you! And if you can’t open up, or are only capable of a few sporadic texts then what’s really our purpose? In addition to that, no woman wants to feel like she’s on the back burner. None of us want to be in the emergency glass case next to a mallet labeled “in case of horniness, break here”. If you are talking to 50 different women that is certainly your right, but it is your responsibility to at least make every one chick you talk to feel as if she’s the only one, and to not mass text your dick pic to a listserve of bitches you want to bang. If you don’t have the attention span to keep things moving progressively with these women, then don’t pursue anything. If I decide I want to get to know you then I pencil in time for it. Period.

I’ve been there done that with the whole juggling several dudes and it just wasn’t my cup of tea. It felt a little sleazy and if all of them were having a bad day I had to listen to EVERYBODY’S problems. On top of that, I do have the hard fast rule of only one bedmate at a time– so whilst physically engaged with one I had to keep the other irons in the fire with lustful texts and sexy selfies. I’m not a fucking photographer and a lot of production goes into those damned selfies—must have good lighting, proper body angles, face cropped out at just the right spot, subtle but natural filter, etc. Say it with me guys, ain’t nobody got time for that. I’ve long since decided to vibe with just one or two dudes who seem like they have something going on deeper than meets the eye and leave it at that. So far, I keep getting sucked into the black hole of modern dating norms and I can’t even level with anyone on where I’m coming from because the first rule of dating club is that you don’t talk about anything of substance at all…ever. I don’t want to spend my thirties regulated to texting purgatory with dudes, then fucking them on the first date because it feels like we’ve known each other for a while,  when all I really know is that you like to call me baby and you don’t answer your messages between 10am and 9pm. I am truly and sincerely not about this life. I have to be myself in everything, and I just can’t get with this or change my stripes in order to get with it.