how did you get out of a romantic rut? how did you stop being single?

November 8, 2008 1:57 PM

how did you get out of a romantic rut? how did you stop being single?

This isn't a how to question as much as a how did question.

You were single. You didn't think you'd meet anyone, you were open to it, but you were quite self sufficient and comfortable. You were enjoying life, blah blah, but you wanted a relationship in the long term and was maybe angsting about it when other things weren't going too well, but got really anxious and territorial about your life when the prospect of things changing came up. People tended to tell you you had a lot of bad luck with romantic relationships; you could never seem to meet anyone 'right'. You overanalysed everything, and self-sabotaged as much as you could, so you could stay single. But now you're in a relationship. How did this happen? Was it the person, the external factors, or something else?

(the answer I'm looking for is not 'i started to love myself' or anything prescriptive. It is details of how things actually happened: I started meeting someone every day, our dates worked out, our one night stand worked out, etc)

posted by iamnotateenagegirl to Human Relations (21 answers total)

I went to a meetup and met someone who I wanted to see more of and he wanted to see more of me also. He sent me an email afterwards telling me so and I said "wow that's cool, me too!" and it was about that simple.
posted by jessamyn at 2:05 PM on November 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

I got laid off, which opened up the (former) co-worker avenue. They'd all known my no-dating-in-the-workplace policy, but that went out the window along with my job. At my going-away party on the night of my last day of work the girl I'd had a (well-hidden) crush
on made her feelings known, and the rest is a sad story of spiralling back to my previous single state. sigh.
posted by carsonb at 2:31 PM on November 8, 2008

As a sort of corollary, being unemployed is nearly as bad as having a no-dating-in-the-workplace policy in terms of establishing romantic relationships.
posted by carsonb at 2:34 PM on November 8, 2008

Yeah, much like Jessamyn, I went to a meetup (not of the Mefi sort), met a guy, ended up going to a concert together shortly thereafter and we've been together every since.

(Also: how is this not chatfilter?)
posted by youcancallmeal at 2:42 PM on November 8, 2008

during the beginning of my final year in university, i wound up bumping into a friend of mine from first year. incidentally, he was one of the first people i met at mcgill and we actually made out at one point . . . but i was too guilty about my [kind of] boyfriend at home from high school to pursue him.

fast-forward three years, i bump into him at a bar, he's been abroad for the last year and we started hanging out, which morphed into making out, which changed into staying over and eventually the l-bomb. this process took about three months and we're living together now!


this was completely coincidence. right time, right place, both physically and emotionally. i was expecting to break up in may when we both graduated, not really looking for a long-term thing, but we turned out to be better together than i originally anticipated! so wacky! i would have never in a million years predicted things would end up this way, and it's still vaguely surreal at times that i'm dating him.
posted by chickadee at 2:56 PM on November 8, 2008

I started making big plans for solo travel and then a charming stranger butted in and ruined everything.

Specifically: I was at a cafe in Soho figuring out my Eurail options when he introduced himself by saying, "Prague? Why would anyone want to go there?" The next night we had dinner, then climbed a fire escape and had an excellent conversation I can still quote at length, broke into a public park for a late night stroll, talked our way out of a police citation, and went back to his place.

Fourteen years later, I still haven't been to Prague. But he's still here.
posted by roger ackroyd at 2:56 PM on November 8, 2008 [11 favorites]

Best answer: I went to a meetup and met someone who I wanted to see more of and he wanted to see more of me also. He sent me an email afterwards telling me so and I said "wow that's cool, me too!" and it was about that simple.

Exactly this pattern, though not at a meetup.

But it wasn't like it was some inevitable thing, foreordained by the fates, anything like that. Had I not sent a "hey, you are pretty cool" email later that night, or if it had been a hassle to find an evening when we were both free, or anything else, things would have been different.

Meaning, you probably won't know when you are in that moment, choosing whether or not to make the phone call or send the email or go over to the cutie and ask him/her for their number, if it will lead to a lifetime of bliss or a few moments of embarrassment. And if you let those moments of embarrassment (and there will be a lot) keep you from making a move, then you are going to stay stuck in the place where you are.

In other words, "stop overthinking this" is pretty solid advice. So are all those other cliches about taking risks and living life while you have it.
posted by Forktine at 3:00 PM on November 8, 2008 [10 favorites]

I got out of a bad relationship that was clouding my radar and concentrated on being the best ME I could be, not in hopes of meeting someone but just because it was the right thing to do. Then, someone that I'd known for about a year or so started looking good to me. I noticed how smart and funny he was, how kind and easygoing, and how blue his eyes were. I developed some serious feelings for him and eventually told him this. He was surprised and didn't know what to do or say. Somehow within a month he'd moved in with me and in less than a year, we were married with a baby.

This happened to me at the ancient age of 43. I just sort of let go of a lot of baggage and was able to see what I'd been missing.
posted by Kangaroo at 3:10 PM on November 8, 2008 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Somebody liked me so much that she decided that she just had to be with me and wouldn't quit. I obliged.

(note: if you are male and try to do this you may get sent to jail or hurt in some fashion.)
posted by Electrius at 3:33 PM on November 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

I had been single for about five months (finally feeling pretty good after being dumped pretty hard) , was settled into a new apartment, had a steady job...but needed to get out of the house... so my friends talked me into trying online dating. (basically one of my guy friends talked me into 'gettin' back on the horse' after i had picked myself up from the breakup.) i had a few dates that sort of fizzled, but kept at it, and eventually i had a date with one very special guy. we clicked pretty much right away, and started seeing a lot of each other... yadda yadda yadda....he's now my husband :)
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 3:33 PM on November 8, 2008

A blind date in college worked out and 21 years later we are still happily married.
posted by COD at 4:31 PM on November 8, 2008

i was single for about four years. i moved back to my hometown, happened to reconnect with an ex whom i had loved very much more than 10 years earlier, and voila. we hung out for about four months as friends, dancing around the idea of getting back together again, and then we went out to dinner, and i kissed him. and it went from there. been (back) together about 11 months now.
posted by thinkingwoman at 4:36 PM on November 8, 2008

jessamyn: I went to a meetup and met someone who I wanted to see more of and he wanted to see more of me also. He sent me an email afterwards telling me so and I said "wow that's cool, me too!" and it was about that simple.

Seconded! Motion passed! (Except I wasn't self-sabotaging; I was just waiting for the right someone to come along. Who knew!)
posted by not_on_display at 9:21 PM on November 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

I ran into someone I used to know from school, and had no interest in romantically. We had nothing in common at a time in life when "things in common" seemed the correct bases for relationships. So we exchanged e-mail addresses because I'd mentioned a funny e-mail clip I'd been sent by a friend (a cat jumping out and tackling a toddler), and I offered to forward it.

We're into the ninth year of our relationship and third of marriage.

I think the important factor was in becoming close with this other person. The relationship wasn't based on presupposed biases or roles or templates, it was based on just learning that I liked this person for who they were. It suddenly wasn't relevant that I liked this music, this style of dress, this aesthetic; what mattered was that I liked this other person and we could talk to one another. And that we find cats taking out infants to be hilarious.
posted by Graygorey at 12:01 AM on November 9, 2008 [2 favorites]

Best answer: i found that it was the anxiety of maintaining a relationship that was driving people away in the first place. i discovered that i tend to manipulate people in a passive aggressive way based on how i feel about situations. so once i began to feel uncomfortable, i'd do something to get driven away, in a nutshell.

the solution. get to know a few potential partners, so you're not heaping excessive amounts of affection or attention on one or the other. it helped for me not to be intimate at this time and be a getting to know you thing instead of a dating thing. the floodgates, for me, tend to get knocked off their hinges once i sleep with someone, or before while getting to know them, since sharing experiences usually changes your mind in various ways. so in this process, if you're only focusing all what you are on one person, it can be a bit too much for them and you all at once.

it's much easier to ease into it, with multiple people as emotional surrogates of sorts. having an attitude of 'i don't need a girlfriend' helps. true, in the long run, it's kind of skeezy because the intentions are not being clear from the very beginning, ala, the 'conventional' route of dating, mating, cohabitating and copying, it's seeing people as friends before them partners.

or maybe i never met the right person until who i'm with now.

listen to the expert on the matter, Dan Savage
" Relationships never work out, until you find one that does. "
posted by emptyinside at 12:07 AM on November 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

I remembered a dating site I had been on. I hadn't checked it in ages (like over a year) and coincidentally, there was an email from a cute. Nine months later, we're still rolling.
posted by cachondeo45 at 6:20 AM on November 9, 2008

5.5 years ago, I was in a rut of sorts. I had gone through an emotional break up with my ex boyfriend and I had also had a falling out with my closest friend. I was pretty miserable. So I made a list of everything I wanted and also a plan regarding specific steps to get what I wanted. I wanted a new boyfriend, so I made a list of all the places I could potentially meet a new boyfriend (for me this meant local civic and social groups, but for you it could mean church or school etc.). Then I promised myself that I would go to several events a week with these groups. I volunteered, I went bowling, I went to happy hours, I went wine-tasting, I met people at the happy hours who invited me to further happy hours which I attended. I started my own hiking group. Within a few weeks, I had dates with several men... One of those men was my future husband. We've been married for just over a week.
posted by bananafish at 3:31 PM on November 9, 2008 [5 favorites]

I went to a book club meeting that I'd been skipping for a couple of months due to grad school. I found I'd been sort of replaced by a cute guy who lived at my subway stop. He emailed me that night and asked me to lunch...and I never got the email. A month later I made it back to the book club and he immediately asked me out for dinner and we've been inseparable ever since. I'm especially impressed that he took the risk of asking me out the second time we met since I never responded to his email (I SWEAR I never got it!).
posted by purplecurlygirl at 5:25 PM on November 9, 2008

I went to a meetup in 2006 and noticed this totally cute guy at the other end of the table. But it was a long table and I'm shy, so I didn't actually talk to him that night. Then I went to *another* meetup ~1.5 years later and befriended some people who turned out to be also be friends with the aforementioned cute young man. We then sorta hung out a few times in the sense that we were both hanging out with mutual friends, some other stuff happened where we each were attempting to date other people until one magical night at said mutual friends apartment where we realized we both loved the movie Roadhouse. Fate stepped in a offered us a midnight showing of Roadhouse a week later and Swayze pretty much cast a love spell on us that night.

I guess the point is that none of this would have happened had I not put myself out there and met new people. I wasn't specifically looking for a boyfriend, but it was a nice surprise.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 10:15 PM on November 9, 2008 [2 favorites]

I had a profile on a dating site. He emailed me, I emailed back. He emailed his phone number and gave me a time he'd be available to talk. I called him. Two weeks of phone calls, then a date. 9 months of long-distance (100 miles) dating, then he moved in. 3 years later, we're married.

It's worth noting that I fell into the cliche of "when you least expect it..." because despite my presence on a dating site, I was NOT looking for anything serious. I'd had a bad break up 4 months prior and a string of ill-advised summer flings, so when my now-husband emailed, I stressed that I wanted to be JUST FRIENDS. I carried that mindset into our first date, and I was totally myself because I didn't have any expectations. On the second date, I thought fuck it, I really do like the guy, and that turned into Epic Romance.
posted by desjardins at 11:36 AM on November 10, 2008 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: thanks guys. this proved to me (I was at home on a saturday night, thinking and overanalysing too much) there are no patterns. It may not have seemed like a direct problem question, but it was a series of answers that worked as well as if I had posted such.
posted by iamnotateenagegirl at 2:25 PM on November 10, 2008