Dating is so not what it used to be. Understatement, I know.

Remember when it was as easy as going to the club and flirting with a cute guy? Those were the days. Half drunk, more often completely wasted, and locking lips in the corner with some guy you’ve known all of twenty minutes. Then you exchange numbers, no doubt it’s you giving him your number because what girl would call a guy for a date, right? Then he would call and you’d go out, all uncomfortable at first because you are both sober and can’t really recall what the other is like.

Ah, the good old days.

Now it’s all online dating. We have ads on multiple sites, a blog; we’re on Twitter or Facebook. We can Google someone and find out whether they’re being honest with us about many things. We can see pictures of him and the wife he says he doesn’t have. We can read that article about him being shot in the line of duty three years ago. We can read about how he lost his virginity to his friend’s older sister at a much too young age.

We can find out too many things that we shouldn’t. We don’t need to know everything about someone after a first meeting, or often before meeting at all. We all have baggage. That’s not news. The problem is that we read some article, or blog post or whatever, and assume that that is the story. That is only part of it, the part that they’ve decided to tell, and we never really read these things completely open-minded, without intent.

We are looking for this information, reading all these little tidbits, looking for spinach. That’s right, I said spinach. As one friend aptly puts it, “There is always spinach in his teeth.” That would be the thing that she just can’t accept in him, that makes him not good dating material for her. Sometimes the spinach is easy, other times it takes a lot to find it, but she always finds it.

I don’t want to find the spinach. If we are always looking for a reason for it to fail, of course it’s going to fail. In this quest to not find the spinach, I don’t look, and I often tend to overlook it even when it is staring me straight in the face. That’s because I want to see the best in people, to trust and believe that they are good people and are who they say they are. What happens though is that I spend too long with someone who has spinach I shouldn’t accept.

How do I find a happy medium.



This song isn’t really about spinach, but neither is my post.