From the untitled fiction project #projectIDGAF.
Dating has always been a nightmare. Forget the humiliation, awkwardness, clumsiness, and most people’s internal insistence that they make lepers look good. Forget that when the innocent word “love” needs a break from the rack, we stuff it into an Iron Maiden. Skip that attraction ranges from “you’re kind of nice” all the way up to “I would be your adoring servant for eternity” and the resultant complications of asymmetric attraction. Finding someone who likes you exactly the way you like them is impossible. Finding someone whose attraction you’re willing to indulge in exchange for them indulging yours has to be good enough.
Worse: there’s no rules. Everybody has to discover their own path, with useless guidance from media, family, and society. In 1989, media disguised cruelty as honesty and rape as romance—remember, “it’s okay if it’s funny!” Well-meaning parents told children to “just talk to them,” which is a great start but spectacularly implodes two sentences after “hi” and they probably don’t like you anyway. Nobody likes you.
It’s not perfect now, but broad awareness of the word “consent” does make things suck less.