Online dating helped me realise it’s fine to be myself
Like so many people, I was prepared to pay for an online dating service. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how it would help me develop as a person.
Perhaps it’s a British thing, but I did not grow up ‘dating.’ My impression is that when Americans say they are dating someone, it suggests a relationship ranging from tentative to full blown.
No doubt this was the term used many decades ago to suggest you were seeing people casually, before finding ‘the one’, and settling down to marriage (at a time when everyone was expected to get married).
The very old fashioned term in Britain for this would be ‘courting’ — being involved with someone romantically, with the view to marriage. It is the sort of term that still gets used occasionally by Grandparents.
Even in adolescence our language was different. If you asked someone if they ‘wanted to go out with you?’ that probably meant for them to become your full-on boyfriend/girlfriend, not literally to just go out once.
As I got older and you start to meet people and start to have some semblance of relationships, Even then, that wasn’t through dating. You clicked with someone entirely by accident, and things…