Lifestyle: Ten good reasons to take a break from dating

Exhausted with the dating scene and wanna take a time out? Perhaps you’re not so sure you should, just in case you end up on the shelf and everyone gets taken in the meantime. If you’re in two minds, join Beauty and Tips as we take a look at 10 good reasons to take a break from dating.

Dating can be hard – but fun

However, it’s only fun when you go on one or two great dates before meeting someone cool who you enter into a relationship with. When you become a serial dater who’s venturing out on at least one disastrous date per month, on the other hand, dating is no longer fun. It’s exhausting, tedious and kinda weird.

It gets worse when you’re the one who’s rejected, too. The emotional roller coaster of the whole thing should be enough to put us off dating for life, but the question we always return to is this: If we quit dating, wouldn’t we be single forever? You don’t have to quit dating forever.

But if you’re tired of futile dates in the freezing cold, encounters with crazy guys and having to change your number because some creeps won’t get the picture that you don’t like them, you can always just take a break. Why should you? Here are 10 good reasons to take a break from dating.

Rediscover who you are

Dating can drawn you into a sort-of parallel universe where you’re you – but also someone else. You’re meeting up with all different kinds of guys from different walks of life, and a lot of the time you have to adjust your own personality a little. You know how it is: You’re on a date with a cute guy who happens to be obsessed with Star Trek.

You’ve never seen it, but to impress you tell him you love it, too. And when he asks for your favourite episode, you tell him you can’t choose just one. You love them all! When you free yourself from the dating scene, you also free yourself from discussing who other people are. You get a chance to rediscover your own passions and hobbies. You’ve got more time to dedicate yourself to do doing what you really love to do.

Because being single is fun

Hey, you’re single and guess what – lots of people are secretly jealous! Being single is better than dating losers. You get to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Have a blast!

You stop looking

They say that love comes when we’re not even looking for it. A lot of people will surely agree with this. If you’ve been spending the best part of the last year trying to force love out of a bunch of strangers online, it might be a good idea to take yourself out of the firing line and let nature and destiny take over. Give yourself up to the gods. You might experience a lovely surprise when you least expect it.

You can focus on making friends instead

Tired of meeting people for love and it all going wrong? Why not ease the pressure and widen your social circle instead? Meeting new people for friendship is a lot easier than the pressure cooker environment of the dating scene. You get to relax a bit more, take it easy, and don’t have to worry about why he isn’t texting back. It’s so much more fun! Join an app like Bumble and find new friends to hang out with.

You reaffirm your self image

It’s 1am. You went to bed an hour ago. You can’t sleep. You keep thinking about him and why he hasn’t texted since 8pm. You deliberately left your phone in another room so you wouldn’t check your phone in bed. After all, you need sleep.

Screw that! You leap out of bed into the freezing cold, stub your toe on something and check your phone. He hasn’t texted and now you feel silly, cold and your toe is throbbing. Worse still, you ask yourself “what have I become?!” When we’re dating too much, we can lose sight of our self image. We check our phone every five minutes and literally can’t cope if our date hasn’t replied.

It’s not cool, we hate ourselves for doing it, and it’s not how we normally behave. Take a break from dating and reaffirm your self image. You don’t need to be the one who is still awake at 1am waiting for a text. You’re better than that and deserve better than that.

You’re not ready to date

If you need a break from dating, it might mean that you’ve not been ready for a relationship this whole time. Take a breather and only return to the dating scene when you’re truly ready to meet a new man.

Use the time to analyse past mistakes

One of the reasons you’ve been bouncing from bad date to bad date could be that you haven’t given yourself enough time between each guy to reflect on what went wrong. It’s important that you analyse past relationships so that you can learn from mistakes, ensuring they don’t happen again. Take a look at your past and see if there are things you can improve on.

A break will save you some time

Dating can take a lot of your time, but when you are single you can use all this time for spending quality moments with your family and friends, or on self development or taking a new and fun hobby, it is an excellent reason to take a break from dating, at least for some time.

You can reevaluate what you want from a guy

We can spend so much time shopping around online for dates that we forget what we even want in a guy. Taking some time out from the dating scene gives you an excellent opportunity to reevaluate what it is you want from a guy. Spend some time writing down qualities you want in a man so that when he does eventually come along, you know he’s the one for you.

Learn a new skill

As you know, dating can take up a lot of time. If you aren’t on dates, you’re texting new guys. If you aren’t texting them, you’re calling them. If you aren’t doing that, you’re browsing lots of profiles. Dating takes up so much time that we never have the time to do anything else.

Take a break from dating and focus on learning a new skill. It’s so much more productive.