We’re Afraid of Wasting Time

Before we begin

This piece is not against people who are only looking for sex.

That would be rather hypocritical.

There are moments in life when we want an encounter, pleasure, lightness and nothing more. That is perfectly fine.

Not everything has to become a story.

And above all, we do not have to remain loyal forever to what we wanted yesterday.

We have the right to change. Our desire. Our priorities. Even our idea of love.

We may spend years wanting no ties and then realise one day that we would like somebody to stay.

We may have been looking for sex and begin to want intimacy.

We may also go in the opposite direction.

Nobody owes an explanation.

I am simply talking here about those who, today, want to go beyond the date.

Those willing to invest time, attention and curiosity in another person.

That is where the contradiction begins:

we say we want something with depth, but often choose with tools designed to make decisions in seconds.

We want someone to stay.

Yet we keep searching as though the next person were already waiting.

Once, you had to know someone

Once, in order to know somebody, you actually had to know them.

It sounds like an idiotic sentence.

Today it feels almost revolutionary.

You met them in a bar, at a party, at work, through friends. Perhaps you did not even like them very much at first.

Then they spoke.

They laughed.

They said something intelligent.

Or something completely stupid, but in exactly the right way.

You saw them again.

You began to recognise the voice, the hands, the way they entered a room.

And something could happen that we seem to have almost forgotten:

a person could become attractive while you were getting to know them.

They did not have to arrive fully packaged.

There was no technical specification.

No height declared to the centimetre.

No photograph chosen from forty-seven attempts to prove that yes, that really is you, preferably on the best day of the last six years.

The person arrived before the passport.

It was not paradise

I do not want to become the person who says everything was better before.

Back then phones also weighed like domestic appliances, bars were full of smoke and people disappeared without needing to invent the word ghosting.

It was not paradise.

But there was more time.

Or at least it felt as though there was.

I met extraordinary people that way.

Beautiful, less beautiful, famous, completely unknown. People I might now have dismissed had they been presented to me as six photographs and four compulsory facts.

Some became loves.

Some became sex.

Some friendships.

A few were terrible ideas.

Those count too.

Not everything has to become a relationship in order to have been worth living.

The problem is that today we have become very good at avoiding bad ideas.

And perhaps, in the same gesture, a few wonderful ones too.

Passport control

The moment we meet someone, the inspection begins.

Age.

Body.

Height.

Job.

Where do you live?

What are you looking for?

What is your role in bed?

Recent photos?

Actually recent, or recent according to the Julian calendar?

Then, if everything is in order, perhaps we open the CV.

Personality.

Humour.

Tenderness.

Intelligence.

The ability to listen.

How they treat a waiter.

How they react when you are sad.

Whether they can sit in silence without checking their phone.

Minor details.

After all, who would choose somebody to spend a life with on the basis of things like that?

Abs first.

Let us be serious.

The point is not to pretend appearance does not matter.

It does.

Desire exists. Preferences exist.

I have them. You have them.

So does the person posting quotations about the importance of the soul while filtering by age.

We have not become beings of pure light.

We look before we know.

That is human.

What may have changed is that once, the look was the beginning of the process.

Now it can be the end.

Not attractive enough. Next.

Too old. Next.

Too much of this. Not enough of that. Next.

There is always somebody after.

And it is precisely this apparently endless availability that makes every person feel surprisingly replaceable.

The next one

It is one of the most seductive promises of our time.

Perhaps the next one will be better looking.

Younger.

More interesting.

More compatible.

More everything.

And while we wait for the upgrade, real people inevitably begin to look defective.

Because a real person has one terrible characteristic:

they exist.

They have fears. Contradictions. A body that changes. A past.

They may snore.

The next candidate, on the other hand, has no flaws yet.

We do not know them.

Fantasy always enjoys better commercial terms than reality.

The time we do not want to waste

There is something I understand, though.

We are tired.

Tired of pointless dates.

Of conversations that begin with enthusiasm and end with a thumbs-up emoji.

Tired of ghosting.

Tired of starting again.

And when we are no longer very young, there is another thought nobody particularly enjoys saying aloud:

time passes.

Another year.

Then another.

So we become more selective.

We want to avoid mistakes. Recognise immediately what will not work. We want the best.

Except that in trying so hard not to waste time, we have created a rather beautiful paradox:

we are so afraid of wasting time that we no longer give people any.

And then another year passes.

I would like to be known. You, preferably not.

Of course there is hypocrisy too.

I would like somebody to look beyond my photograph.

To give me enough time to speak.

Not to decide immediately what I am worth on the basis of age, body or some other piece of information turned into a barcode.

I would like to be seen as a person.

Then I open a profile that does not convince me and take roughly four seconds to do exactly what I hate having done to me.

We are magnificent creatures.

We demand depth from other people while using supermarket criteria to select them.

I am not excluding myself.

I have judged too quickly.

I have dismissed people.

I have probably missed somebody too.

It is very easy to denounce superficiality when we are the ones being rejected.

It becomes more interesting when we remember all the times our finger was on the button.

The market

Sometimes dating makes me think of a market.

There are premium products.

The ones who never seem to know what a sale is.

Then there is everybody else.

Good quality. Respectable packaging. A few dents in the box. Generally positive reviews.

Not because people really are merchandise.

Quite the opposite.

The fact that we can talk about ourselves this way shows how deeply we have absorbed the language of the market.

Value. Demand. Supply. Competition. Visibility. Age brackets.

At some point all that is missing is “add to basket”.

And yet none of us is a product.

Not the beautiful one.

Not the young one.

Not even the one who can choose between a hundred people today.

The market has one rather unromantic characteristic:

sooner or later, it changes your category too.

Not enough

This, perhaps, is the part that really hurts.

Not rejection.

Rejection belongs to life.

We cannot appeal to everybody and, frankly, it would be exhausting.

What hurts is thinking:

I am not enough to be chosen.

Not attractive enough.

Not young enough.

Not desirable enough.

And above all, not even having the chance to discover whether, by knowing us, somebody might have seen something else.

Being rejected after being known can break your heart.

Being dismissed before being known creates a different kind of pain.

You become a form that failed passport control.

The CV remains closed.

It is another version of the same invisible jury: we are measured before anyone has had time to actually meet us.

The past is not a sentimental pension

Sometimes, to console myself, I think:

I had fun.

I was desired.

I was loved.

I loved.

All true.

But the past is not an income.

Having been loved does not mean we have been loved enough for the rest of our lives.

There is no sentimental allowance.

Nobody arrives at a certain age and says:

“We are sorry. You have already used several great loves, a number of adventures and a quantity of incidents we would rather not specify. Your allowance has been exhausted.”

We all have the right to hope that something beautiful may still happen.

At twenty-five.

At fifty.

At seventy.

It is not a demand for a guarantee.

It is simply refusing to treat ourselves as already belonging to the past while we are still here.

Perhaps we have not stopped being capable of love. Sometimes we have simply learned to protect ourselves so well that it becomes difficult for anybody to get close enough.

So, given how brilliantly the market is working…

We may as well publish an advert.

APPLICATIONS OPEN

Seeking a man willing to get to know a person before checking his passport.

Preferred qualifications:

curiosity;

humour;

the ability to listen;

no known allergy to tenderness;

willingness to consider the scandalous possibility that somebody may become more interesting after twenty minutes.

Age, body, sex, roles and preferences exist.

Let us not pretend we have suddenly become spiritual beings.

Perhaps we can simply stop turning every preference into border control.

I am not looking for the perfect man.

That would be rather arrogant, considering the candidate I am offering in return.

I am looking for somebody willing to be known.

And, ideally, willing to do the same with me.

No guarantees.

No refunds.

First interview preferably over a drink.

We will see about the rest.

Slowly.

Because perhaps we have not lost the ability to fall in love.

Perhaps we have only lost the patience required for somebody to surprise us.

The boutique is not closed.

It is simply by appointment only.