dating is only terrible because it’s the wrong canvas entirely

The dating scene is horrendous. You’ve heard this innumerable times. You’ve lived it. And it’s 100% incorrect.

The problem, as is often the case, is in the framing:

The idea that you could enter something so neatly-defined, orderly, and safe as a “scene” and achieve something so messy, so consequential, so powerful as bonded love.

"Love is a force. It has no structure. Love is communion. It has no contract."

Dating is a relatively new concept. Its modern form arose, like many things, in the United States, by the 1890s. Before it, in the English-speaking world, there was courtship for wealthy families. Make do for the little folk. Before that, for most of history, and in many places, marriages were simply arranged—to unite families in community, wealth, or strategy.

But what about the rest of the world? And the deeper part? What about the rules, depending on who you were and when you lived? How you felt, and who you felt it for?

There is a reason why one of the most fiercely deprived rights has always been the right to love. And the tools have always been the same; force, fear, and fantasy.

It was force that was used to prevent enslaved people from forming close bonds. It was fear people were taught to harbor for the very difference that strengthens every species. It was fantasy that was conjured to make people mistrust those forms of love they’d not been exposed to.

And yet, the right to love is as fundamental as the right to life. Indeed, it is the first manifestation of shared life. You cannot control who you share life with—all 8 billion people on this planet, in varying degrees of closeness—but bonded love at its core is shared life in its deepest form, across space and time and sometimes reason.

Love is a force. It has no structure. Love is communion. It has no contract. Bonded love is entanglement. Bonded love is being bound. It is far deeper than any courtship or scene or structure.

Entanglement as choice is a multi-century movement. And a poorly discussed one. From having an equal say to the parents, to having a choice at all. From being a call of the community to a tool of the kingdom. It has never been a battle to “love who you love”, because love is not a thing that can be stopped or started.

The true movement has always been about the right to share in life.

"To share life is to be tied in spirit."

But people see only the surface, in themselves and in others.

A collection of flags—red, green, yellow. A collection of opinions, presumptions, and assumptions. A small litany of boxes for checking—and fitting into. A need for intimacy, hidden behind the carefully planned idea of a night that never happens, and a person you never meet, because the boxes were cluttering the table so high, you couldn’t see the other side.

How can you find something if you think you already have the answers? You will have a dozen meetings and meet no one. A thousand chats and find nothing. A million moments and a life no more full than you had before.

The ad that promises that “dating doesn’t have to be terrible” is wrong in that “dating” is itself a terrible thing—it is the wrapping up of an ancient and cosmic thing and shoving it into a box ten sizes too small, ten widths too narrow, ten shades too colorless.

Because to share life, in the bonded way—to be bound together—is not simply to find your person(s) or to be in love. It is to understand that you are entering into something larger than yourself. Yours and not yours. Theirs and not theirs. All of yours and none of yours and more. As the most powerful things are.

To share life is to be tied in spirit. And the closer you are, the deeper the entanglement, the tighter the knot.

"Discover. Fall. Share life."

A date can always be pleasant, as can any shared adventure, conversation, experience. But many a poison is also pleasant.

And this one is a wholly insufficient landscape for a thing as raw and ravenous as the life you were gifted, and the question of sharing it.

Be bound to the earth, because you came from it.

Be bound to the spirit, because it’s the thing that’s real.

And be free from the illusions that tell you that love is the thing that lives in the time between texts, the practiced lies before truths, or the safety of the familiar.

Don’t look for a person. Go where you will change. Don’t assess others. Learn them. Don’t date. Discover. Fall. Share life.

Because the promise of bonded love is not that you will be affirmed, or met, and it’s not that you’ll find perfect balance or equal footing or the imaginary person in your head. It is that you will be changed, and that change will be worth it. It is that you will be home, and that home will be borderless.

It is that you will discover something in and with a real person, or people, and unleash the deepest life you’ve never lived.

The truth is: the problem was never the scene, or the app, or them. The problem is what all of it was seeded in.

Love is not a thing to be auditioned, any more than grief is. Any more than life is. So stop auditioning.

Go and live.