10 Pieces Of Dating Advice Our Parents Wish They Could Give Us If We Just Shut Up And Listen

1. You will never be satisfied with what you have if all you do is keep swiping. You will never get to know someone when you’re already looking for the next best thing, you will never appreciate a conversation when you have ten other unopened conversations. You will never get to see someone’s real beauty if you keep thinking of the other 50 photos on your screen.

2. You will never be 100% sure of anything in life. You will never be 100% sure that this person is the one, or that this person will love you forever, in fact, you will never be sure of anything in life but sometimes you just have to trust your gut, your heart, your instincts or whatever internal radar you have that moves you towards someone and just go for it. Perfection does not exist so stop waiting for it.

3. If you want to tell someone how you feel, tell them. Playing games and hiding your feelings will not get you the love you want or even the peace of mind you want. Love was always something valuable, something to be cherished, something to be taken seriously, the more you disparage love, the more it will elude you.

4. Communication should be easy. Communication should be face to face – alone in a quiet area. Not over texts that can be deleted, or stories that disappear, or disturbed by noise and loud music. Communication was memorable and echoed in your heart; it wasn’t slurred over shots of tequila and forgotten the next morning.

5. Love is not easy. Finding love is not easy, falling in love is not easy and staying in love is not easy, but it’s what we all secretly hope for. Nowadays people go into dating expecting it to be easy and stress-free but this is why it all falls apart so quickly, if you are not going to fight for love, you will lose it.

6. If you can’t tell us about it, then it’s not right. If you can’t face your parents or explain the situation, if you can’t put a label on it for your parents or if you can’t define the relationship to your parents, then it’s clearly not right.

7. Sleeping with someone you don’t have feelings for is not intimacy. Intimacy involves feelings, emotions, chemistry and passion. Liking a body without understanding its soul is anything but intimacy.

8. Timing has never been an issue. Timing, distance and geography never really got in the way between two people who wanted to be together. Today, it’s the perfect excuse to run away from commitment, run away from responsibility, run away from trying harder and run away from putting in some work in the relationship.

9. Being exclusive is not a favor it’s a necessity. The norm has been casual dating that being exclusive has become so foreign. Letting the person know that you are only interested in being with them is the first principle of love – if you don’t have that, then you don’t have a foundation to make your love grow.

10. They didn’t know any better, they just didn’t give up easily. They didn’t have a secret formula that we don’t have, they didn’t use any voodoo magic. They were just born at a time where people didn’t give up that easily on each other, when they didn’t hide their emotions behind their phones, when they didn’t date other people to forget about the one they really want to date. They weren’t afraid of rejection; or maybe they were but it didn’t stop them. I think they were just born at a time when dating was the bridge to finding love, not a dam to block it.

Maybe our way is better and their way is not. Maybe it wasn’t easy for them either and they just settled, I guess that’s the confusing part about it all – I feel like modern dating keeps ripping us apart but I don’t know if we should blame it on modern dating or on our choices, or maybe we should blame ourselves because we all one way or another contributed to it and engaged in the same habits we despise.

I guess we all have so many questions about what the hell happened to dating and while we may not know exactly what happened, I think we should keep on trying to find the answer.