CN06: Learning to Date When You Only Know How to Wife

Dating in 2025 feels like binge-watching an entire relationship in a week.Instant spark. Instant access. Instant collapse.

People message like they are ready for a memoir, then disappear like they were never real. We send paragraphs to strangers.We build inside jokes with people we have barely met. We offer full emotional availability with the speed of a loading bar.

It is not intimacy. It is stimulation. And our bodies respond to it like it is the real thing.

I am trying to learn how to date, but here is the truth: I only know how to wife.

I know how to show up fully. I know how to build a life with someone. I know how to commit, nurture, and stay. I know how to love in the long arc, the way that grows over years.

What I do not know is how to be casual. How to flirt without attaching. How to hold lightness when my whole history is heavy with partnership. How to step slowly when my nervous system throws me into the deep end every time.

I used to be landlocked in a relationship. Fifteen years. One life. One identity. You forget how to swim when you have been on the shore that long. And now I am out here in open water, trying to navigate something that changes shape every five minutes.

Dating today is built for disposability. For the quick hit. For the instant spark that burns out on contact.

I want the slow unfolding. The real knowing. The kind of intimacy that builds over time instead of exploding in three days and evaporating in five.

But my nervous system panics at uncertainty. It leaps toward intensity. It confuses availability with affection. It confuses absence with danger.

So I am learning.

Not how to play the game, but how to stay with myself if I meet someone new. How to recognize the difference between connection and adrenaline. How to date without drowning in it.

The collapse is not that dating is broken. It might be that my old skills no longer fit the new terrain.

But I am building new ones. Slowly. Imperfectly. In real time.

Because I may only know how to wife, but I am learning how to date without losing the parts of me that make partnership meaningful.

Learning how to swim again.