In my mid-20s, I was what you might call “terrible at relationships,” I played hard-to-get if I really fancied someone. I avoided sharing my real feelings in case it made me appear too vulnerable. I didn’t reply to a message if I felt like I wanted to reply too much, which now, in my 30s, seems strange and illogical. When I first met my now wife, we came together in a web of mutual dysfunction and enthusiastically embarked on a gray-area situationship that lasted for approximately two years. If I’d been either of our friends at the time, I would have been asking: What are you doing?!
The thing about relationships, though, is that sometimes you learn how to be in one while you’re already there. For me, it happened slowly—so slowly I barely noticed it was happening—until one day, the thrashing waves inside of me were more like soft ripples that you could skim with your hand. It had just taken another person—a specific person, consistently, over time—to calm them down. And vice versa…or so I’m told.
If I’d abided by common relationship wisdom, I definitely wouldn’t have ended up married. Especially if I’d heeded the “three-month rule,” which suggests that if, after three months, you don’t think you’re compatible with the person you’ve been dating, you should probably call it. Like so much of dating culture right now, it’s not dissimilar to how you might approach a workplace scenario. Are your mutual needs being acknowledged and administered to after 90 days? If not, you may need to “let the person go,” so as to avoid any further sunk costs.
I get the three-month rule in theory: You can learn a lot about a person after three months, and if you’re not attracted to them in that time, or realize you have very few mutual interests, then you’re probably not going to magically start making sense together. But I also think that when we treat relationships—which are complicated and knotty and imperfect in nature—like transactions or equations, we can ironically end up selling ourselves short. So much of whether a relationship works out can come down to timing, or where we’re at emotionally, or how we’re able to communicate. I don’t know what any of that has to do with three months.
And the three-month rule isn’t the only trendy edict that tends to flatten the many factors to people’s “stuff.” I often think about the TikTok adage “If they wanted to, they would,” which is basically the Gen-Z version of “he’s just not that into you.” The idea is that you should take a person’s behavior at face value, as it probably reflects how they feel.
Again, it’s an excellent concept in theory. In practice, though, can we confidently say that it’s strictly true? Again, speaking for myself, I used to pull away if I was interested (I told you I was awful), and it took me a while to unfurl from my protective shell. A more accurate adage for me would have been: “If they wanted to, you wouldn’t have a clue.”
I can see the appeal of taking a more formulaic approach to love. When you’ve been on a string of shit dates—as I have, many times, including the time I watched an entire season of Girls in silence on a first date—it can feel a bit like you must be doing something wrong. And if someone’s blowing hot and cold, or isn’t showing enough interest or enthusiasm early on, it absolutely makes sense to put yourself first and find someone who will. But I also think that in abiding by so many rules—as if you’ll never find love unless you treat dating like typing instructions into ChatGPT—we can sometimes hamper the very connections we’re searching for.
I often wonder how I’d approach relationships now that I’m older (and hopefully wiser), if I were single in a parallel universe. I’d love to say that I’d have it all under control. I’d be a perfect communicator, a pillar of emotional support, like someone who’s graduated from the School of Girlfriending with straight As. But I also know that this wouldn’t be the case. Every relationship is completely different, and you can never predict what it’ll bring out of you, or them, or both. Which is why I think a one-size-fits-all system is automatically going to be flawed. Relationships can feel a bit like flailing around in the dark. Maybe you’ll figure out where you are, maybe you won’t. Or maybe, like for me, it’ll just take a bit of extra time to get there.