Lately, I’ve been thinking about how dating feels less like something you do and more like something you survive. Not romantic, just strategic. Like everyone’s following some unspoken protocol for how not to care first. How to leave before you’re left. How to ghost before you’re ghosted. Somewhere along the line, love got replaced with leverage. And I don’t even think we noticed.
I don’t know when I started saying it, but it’s become something of a personal proverb: do dirty or get done dirty. It’s a mantra, a joke, a post-therapy rationalization. But more than anything, it’s a framework, a grim little theorem for how people date now. Not in pursuit of love, not even lust, but dominance. I’m not trying to get close. I’m trying to win.
The problem is, I don’t even know what winning looks like anymore. Is it getting someone to fall harder than me? Is it ghosting first? Is it being the most detached person in the situationship, a kind of emotional arms dealer who never actually fires the gun? Dating has become a zero-sum game, where the only way to feel safe is to make sure the other person feels slightly worse. Intimacy is no longer the goal. Power is.
And this isn’t just a metaphor, it’s textbook game theory. Two people meet, click, and immediately a quiet, mutual fear sets in. Who cares more? Who texts first? Who’s “too available”? It’s a kind of emotional Prisoner’s Dilemma. If we both take the risk of being honest, we might actually connect. But if I open up and you don’t, I lose. So instead, we hedge. I send half-hearted replies. He leaves me on read. No one gets hurt, but no one gets anything at all.
We both think we’re protecting ourselves. But really, we’re just mirroring each other’s fear. No one wants to break first. No one wants to look soft. So we sit there in this calculated emotional stalemate, not because it’s good, but because it feels safer than being wrong alone.
And sure, it is smart. It’s also miserable.
It’s not that I don’t want connection, it’s that I’ve been hurt enough times to start believing the only way forward is to hurt first, or at least appear unhurtable. Which, by the way, is just a trauma response with decent branding.
Today, being emotionally available is viewed with suspicion typically reserved for pyramid schemes and Scientology recruitment. I romanticize aloofness. I confuse basic intimacy with “love bombing.” I call ghosting “protecting my peace.” Every text becomes a strategy. Every vulnerability, a liability. I ritualize breadcrumbing, orbiting, and post-date silence as if they’re sacred rites instead of fear responses.
I know I’m not alone. Diary of an Oxygen Thief is practically scripture for a certain kind of person who’s been hurt and decided to intellectualize it into strategy. Hurt people hurt people, and part of dating is just figuring out where the anger goes when you’re too scared to feel it. Usually, it gets projected onto some poor unassuming guy at a party. Or girl. Or stranger I barely know but decided not to text back because he seemed, terrifyingly, like he might actually like me. The question isn’t who hurt us. We know who hurt us. What’s more interesting is why we want to become them.
But at some point, it has to stop. Not because it’s cruel (though it is), but because it’s boring. The performances are stale. The detachment is hollow. And I’m too busy trying to win to notice I’m not enjoying myself. I can’t strategize my way into love. And eventually, ghosting stops feeling powerful and starts feeling pathetic. I either turn into someone I feel embarrassed to be, or I wake up one day and realize no one’s texting me back because they learned the game from watching me.
So I’m trying to change. I’m trying to unlearn the emotional logic that says silence equals safety. I unghosted Sassy Boy. I apologized for not responding when he asked me out. I expected him to crash out, to get cold, petty, maybe call me flaky and never speak to me again. But instead, he said he respected me for it.
It threw me. I didn’t know people still responded with grace, let things be awkward but honest. And it made me think, maybe connection doesn’t require perfect timing or perfect composure. Maybe it just asks that I show up.
I’m trying. It’s not easy. It feels like I’m handing someone a knife and turning my back, just to see if they use it.
But maybe that means it’s working.
spring break 