Did I Just Forget How to Date or Did Dating Forget How to Breathe?

Last night I sat across from a man whose laugh landed somewhere between a soft snort and Ryan Gosling’s Ken chuckle. The restaurant playlist was moody indie, the lighting was flattering, and the conversation flowed smoother than my overpriced Pinot. Everything looked textbook promising until a rogue thought crashed the party: Wait, do I even remember how to do this?

I’m not afraid of attachment quite the opposite. I’ve logged more consecutive years in relationships than in singlehood, and my dance card of partners still fits on one hand with fingers to spare. But ever since buzzwords like situationship, open-ish, and “let’s-not-label-this” colonized modern dating, sex feels less like a climax and more like a side quest. Intimacy real, awkwardly human intimacy has gone missing in action. Everyone’s busy speed-running to the naked part, as though the eyes-lock, heartbeat-spike tension before lips meet has become retro tech.

Think of me as the serial monogamist who suddenly woke up at the free-for-all buffet. I expected to feel rusty; I didn’t expect to feel like I’d misplaced the entire instruction manual. Somewhere between joking about our mutual disdain for pineapple on pizza and navigating whether a third cocktail was code for take me home, thoughts like whats this one's going to be about. Chemistry used to be tension electric air before a first kiss. Now it feels like a pop-up ad shouting, Skip intro!

I keep wondering if I’ve been conditioned or maybe reconditioned to treat attraction like a flash sale: see it, tap it, bag it before it sells out. My body count isn’t astronomical; it simply matches my ten fingers, yet even that number feels heavy when intimacy has started to blur faces and quirks into a single montage. Remember Sean’s monologue in Good Will Hunting the bit about idiosyncrasies and choosing who gets to see your weird little world? Lately those quirks feel less like cherished secrets and more like currency spent too quickly at a noisy bazaar.

It’s not about moral judgment or purity scores; it’s about energetic math. Every time you share skin, tiny fragments of mood boards, playlists, and inside jokes swap hands. If the exchange rate is fair meaning the other person reciprocates with equal curiosity you leave richer. But if the transaction happens on fast-forward, you walk away lighter in a not-so-zen way, like you accidentally left your phone charger in their wall socket.

Last night’s date ended with a hug outside my building. No furtive grope, no suggestive Uber negotiations, just a genuine hold long enough to hear our exhales sync. It was lovely, but as I climbed the stairs I felt oddly blank.

Maybe the algorithmic abundance has hijacked our inner pacing. When attraction feels like a one-click purchase, the tension that once made forearms tingle gets filed under “obsolete.” I miss that slow tension. The silent count to three before leaning in; the anticipatory static when his hand inches across the table; the way your stomach flips as you postpone pleasure just to study the shape of his smirk. That edge-of-the-seat pulse is where intimacy borrows its power.

So here I am, reacquainting myself with lingering allowing silence to hover, letting eye contact graduate from polite to daring. I want to earn the moment when breathing patterns sync without GPS guidance. Maybe next time I’ll focus on the way his fingers trace the stem of a wineglass, or the momentary fog on his lens when he laughs too hard. Those are the strands intimacy weaves into a rope sturdy enough to climb past lust.

For now, I’ll keep savoring the embarrassingly honest dinner stories and the slow-motion hug good-nights. I haven’t forgotten how to date; I’ve just misplaced the patience for plot development. And patience, I’m realizing, is the exact ingredient that turns sex from a readily available commodity into a rare, long-aged wine slow to pour, impossible to forget.

To everyone navigating this hyper-swipe era: if you sense your romance muscle has atrophied, you’re not broken. You’re just catching your breath in a world that sprints from “Hi, I’m Jack” to “What’s your safe word?” in three text bubbles. Try decaf dating. Give your senses time to bookmark the other person’s imperfections. Because when chemistry finally collides with genuine curiosity, that first kiss will feel less like a skip intro and more like a season premiere worth binge-watching slowly.