Quotes That Show

The last time I was authentically myself was 11 hours ago. You see, I have a date tonight - with a Toyota dude and I’m a Jeep girl...I know, it’s scandalous but I digress.

I think in this day and age social media adds a layer of anxiety to the dating game which was already anxious enough. I mean now we have all these other questions that we stress over like:

“Why hasn’t he followed me yet?”

“Ugh, it’s been 10 minutes since I posted and he still hasn’t liked my photo.”

“He was active on Instagram 4 seconds ago. Why the heck has he not answered my text?”

It’s just a lot and it’s hard and it’s lame as you probably well know. While I have asked these very questions myself along the years, the thing that plagues me most is Instagram stories. You see, I love resharing nature pics and intense animal shots, yoga art and quotes. The quotes shine a light on what I truly desire or how I think or what I value most, they make my soul show as it were. Especially if the quote refers to true love in any sort of way, with these I hesitate to reshare when I know a potential romantic interest is now following me on the gram. I don’t want the dude to read into it and be like “Oh no this girl wants love.” LOL I guess that wouldn’t be that bad right? I mean obviously if you are dating, you hope at some point you’ll find love. But I guess mostly, I don’t want the dude to think I am a cling-on and that I’m putting all my eggs in his basket before the first date has even occurred.

For years this judgment -make believed or not- was daunting to me and if I get really psychoanalytical on myself here, maybe I didn’t want to seem weak because I desired true love. When in truth there is no shame or weakness in that desire at all. I’m a hopeless romantic and I believe in soulmates, end of story.

So last night while scrolling through Instagram, I came across a quote that basically said and I’m paraphrasing here, I am not settling for anything less than great love and a great life. Now when there is no romantic interest afoot, I wouldn’t think twice about resharing it to my story but since I have one afoot, I hesitated. The real and imagined what-if judgments went flying through my head:

“What if he doesn’t text me again?”

“What if he reads way too much into it?”

“What if I scare him off?”

But then I realized, “This quote speaks about my true desires and there is no reason I shouldn’t reshare this and if he gets scared then that’s on him.”

I reshared it. He viewed my story. And guess what? He still texted me and we are still on for our date tonight.

I gave myself permission to be authentically myself even while dating and it felt amazing! Gone are the days where I hide a part of myself on Instagram stories or anything else in fear of judgement from a romantic interest (word to the wise, if they judge you for being you then they aren’t for you). Sure it was scary for me to be authentic and true to myself by resharing that quote but it was completely and entirely worth it! The moral of the story I learned is this: Don’t give anyone power over what you do or don’t do, always be true to your soul and take the power back.