Seeking Her Approval

“When do you want to meet up for a drink?” That was the penultimate question I’d pose to all of my Tinder matches. If I didn’t receive a response within an hour of asking, I virtually cut them loose, concluding that they “weren’t worth my time”.

This pattern defined my dating life for the better half of a decade. After graduating from college, I moved to the “big city” to start my career. I was wide-eyed, full of ambition, but also scared. I had never lived on my own — outside of an academic environment — and didn’t know what to expect from the “real world”. Despite my fears, I was excited to start a new chapter, to join a new community that went beyond college students; but, for whatever reason, I was most excited to start dating.

Having never dated before, I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew what I really wanted. My desires were so strong that they became my # 1 priority to date for the sole purpose of physical gratification.

Pursuing online dating led me down a path that would become all-consuming. I thought that I was leveraging technology to simply cut through the awkwardness of dating, but I was lying to myself. What I really wanted was to protect myself from rejection by quickly assessing whether or not someone found me attractive enough to engage physically.

That’s all I wanted, and that’s all it became.

Every woman I connected with digitally was one more woman I fantasized about. I objectified her and justified my actions as nothing more than “what single men do”. With every woman I met, I felt more guilt and shame. My view of a healthy relationship with women became more and more distorted.

This pattern continued as I moved from city to city. But, as time progressed, so did my desire to change. I wanted to turn from my addiction once and for all. But soon, despite my best efforts, I returned to my destructive habits. I was back on Tinder, back on the websites, looking for what, I really didn’t know. Slowly, through a deep journey of introspection and reflection, I discovered that the reason I was behaving this way was because I was seeking acceptance and value from women. I sought pleasure and temporal satisfaction I found through them because I didn’t think anything else would satisfy.

I have finally come to realize that the worth and value I crave will never come from such relationships. I tried to defeat the feelings of worthlessness by being valued by everyone and everything except the only one in whom my genuine worth and value can be found: the Creator.

originally published by issuesiface.com