An acquaintance once advised me on love, “It is possible to find love, but you have to search for it.” In his view, love, like all other good things in life, comes to those who not just wait, but also seek it.
He is well in his 60s. But his advice seems to be a relic of a bygone era, given the mentality that so many adopt when dating nowadays. Unlike my friend, who has a successful long-term relationship with his partner of many years, I couldn’t help but notice an increasing number of singles who believe that one should not have to search for love, and that the right person will come when one least expects it. Love, it seems, is necessarily effortless and, above all, serendipitous.
But is it really, though? In Chinese, we have an idiom, “to stand by a tree stump waiting for a hare”. It tells the story of a farmer who — by a stroke of luck, chanced upon a hare that ran into a tree stump, broke its neck, and eventually turned into his next meal — decided to give up on his livelihood and wait, foolishly, for the next miracle. The idiom is taught to children to instill the principle that we must put in effort in order to succeed. So, is it the case that modern love has upended centuries of dating culture, and that our rules of engagement are due for an update? I do not believe so. Serendipity makes for a nice story at dinner parties, but precisely because it is the exception rather than the rule.
Because of this, I consider the question of whether we should put in effort to find love, if a relationship is what we want, settled — we should. Instead, what I want to address here is somewhat of a related question: should we therefore skip over those who are not actively searching for love? Or, in other words, is there anyone really worth dating who is not also looking for a relationship like us? The answer, as is often the case, is that it depends.
For the purpose of this discussion, let’s suppose that we meet someone who stands out as someone with whom we might want to get to know better as a potential romantic partner. Perhaps we met them at school, work, or even on a dating app. That doesn’t matter. We are smitten by them, and strike up a conversation to get to know them better. Then, the conversation steers to the topic of dating, and they mention that they have not been actively looking for a relationship so far. We freeze, stopping ourselves in our tracks from impulsively labelling them as a red-flag, the knee-jerk response that modern dating has made us all too accustomed to. Passivity can be a cause of conflict in a relationship, but is it necessarily a dealbreaker this early on? If not, when is it problematic, if at all?
To answer this question, I divided the entire dating pool into four mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups of people. What this means is that every person can be sorted into one, and only one, of these categories. The proof that these four groups do indeed encompass the entire dating pool without overlap has been relegated to the appendix, especially since its details are not of central importance at this point. Instead, let’s delve straight into the groups themselves, and consider what each of them might mean for us.
Group 1
The first group of individuals are those who have the desire to not be in a relationship. In other words, the reason behind their passivity is an aversion to relationships in general.
If this is the case, run the other way, fast. I would advise against dating these individuals. These individuals do not want to be in a relationship with anyone, and that includes you. And the last thing that we would want is to be wasting our time on someone who does not want to be with us. Politely pulling ourselves away from any hope of romance would save both parties a lot of time in the future.
Group 2
The second group of individuals are ambivalent, and neither have the desire to be in a relationship nor the desire to not be in one. For them, their passivity is a result of the lack of a strong desire in either direction. But, the good news — if it is good news at all — is that they have not ruled out the idea of dating completely.
These individuals are unlikely to be active in searching for a relationship. But if they do have qualities which we find attractive in a partner, it might be worthwhile to spend some effort to get to know them better. If, after a reasonable amount of time, they are still on the fence about being in a relationship, then it might be time to pull the plug.
Group 3
The third group of individuals have the desire to be in a relationship, but are passive in searching for one. Unlike the first group, these people are passive in spite of their romantic desire, and not because of it.
I was initially in two minds about them. After all, these people do know what it is that they want. But, I also came to realise that it is one thing to know what one wants, and another thing entirely to still do nothing about it. Look, these individuals might very well be go-getters at work or in other aspects of their lives. But, unless we are willing to pull their weight when it comes to the initial phases of dating, especially if they give us good reasons to do so, we might want to rethink developing things further with them.
Group 4
The last group of individuals have the desire to be in a relationship, and are actively searching for one. From my experience, these are the unicorns in these troubled times, but they do exist.
If these same people also have qualities which you find attractive in a partner, I’d say go for it, and I really wish that things turn out well for the both of you. These individuals know what they want, and they are putting in the time and effort to find it. The both of you might not be a good match for each other — as has happened to me before, because of their wanderlust and me being a homebody — but you could learn a thing or two from them, and I find it refreshing to get to know people who unabashedly fight for what they want.
If you have read until this far, I would love to thank you for your patience, and I sincerely hope that what I have written has provided you with added perspective on dating, regardless of which stage of life you are currently at.
The categorisations provide some framework to understand the otherwise vast dating pool, but the implications that I draw from each of them might not be something that you have to agree with. And that is a good thing too! For example, the uncontroversial advice that I give for the first group of people notwithstanding, we might hold different views on how we should or should not engage with those from the other groups. I know of people who would never date people who are on the fence about relationships, but I also recognise that there are those who would go all out even for those who are stubbornly passive in romance.
Our experiences shape the stories that we believe, and that we tell and re-tell to those around us. Use this article as a launchpad to explore your own world of ideas, about dating and love in general. I wish you all the best in your own adventures, and the unavoidable misadventures, when it comes to love!
Appendix
To derive the four groups that I described in the article, I started with four assumptions about individuals in the dating pool:
The first assumption states that an individual either has the desire to be in a relationship or has not the desire to be in a relationship. The second assumption states that an individual either has the desire to not be in a relationship or has not the desire to not be in a relationship. The third assumption states that no individual has both the desire to be in a relationship and the desire to not be in a relationship. The last assumption states that an individual is either active or not active (i.e., passive) in searching for a relationship.
I find these four assumptions uncontroversial, especially since the first, second and fourth assumptions are a direct application of the principle of non-contradiction.
Notice that the first, second and fourth assumptions are disjunctions, and that their conjunction must also be true if each of them is true. Then, using the distributive property of conjunctions over disjunctions, we arrive at the four groups as presented. In these steps, the third assumption allows us to eliminate redundant groups that describe people who hold mutually contradictory desires.
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