The Year I Stopped Looking for a Relationship Was the Year I Found One

I had been in the specific and occasionally demoralising practice of looking for a relationship since I was 24, and by 28 in San Antonio I had accumulated enough experience of that practice to understand its mechanics reasonably well and to have grown genuinely tired of them.

The apps, the first dates, the calculation of compatibility, the management of hope across the variable timeline of something that might or might not develop into something - all of it had become a low-grade drain that I had been running alongside the rest of my life for four years.

I stopped not because I had a philosophy about it but because I ran out of the energy required to continue. I deleted the apps and told my friends I was taking a break from the whole project and genuinely meant it as a break rather than as a strategy designed to produce the opposite of what the stopping signalled.

The three months that followed were interesting in their own right. The quality of my attention to my own life increased in a way I attributed directly to the removal of the looking - the apps had been not just the active time I spent on them but a background orientation toward the potential of meeting someone that had been slightly pulling my attention away from the life I was already in.

Without the orientation, I was more present in what was actually happening. I was better company to my existing friends. I enjoyed my own space more consistently. I was not waiting.

I met Marcus at a professional event in month four, not because I had stopped looking as a tactic but because I was genuinely not looking and therefore was not performing looking. The conversation was the most naturally beginning thing I have been part of.

We were two people talking at an event, not two people assessing each other's candidacy. I am not offering the stopping as a method. I am noting that the quality of presence I had when I was not looking produced a different kind of connection than the quality of presence I had when I was.