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Hating Early Dating

Susan Kelley
4 min readSep 9, 2021

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Doesn’t Everyone? You Ought To.

Photo by Alvin Mahmudov on Unsplash

There’s the movie screen variation: the meet-cute, the romantic dates, the charming, funny stuff that happens, and then the resolution in a culminating long-term relationship. It’s steadfast.

I get stuck somewhere around the meet-cute and the dates part.

It’s nearly paralyzing, actually.

I have thought back to how dating was when I was a teenager or college student. It seems to me it was vastly different. I recall one specific scenario, when there was a cute boy in my Econ class in high school. He had been at my school all along, it’s just that I never noticed him until one day when the teacher was droning about equity shares and I saw him doodling on his notebook. Somehow, I began to wonder what it would be like to hold his hand, and within days, I got my answer. How could it have been that easy?

Or the time in college, when I stopped by the fraternity house in search of the guy who was supposed to be working on a group project in physics. He of course was nowhere to be found, but a very handsome guy made a spectacle of pretending to look for him, high and low, just so he could keep me around long enough to make me laugh and ask me what my Friday night plans were. By Saturday, it was presumed that we’d be seeing each other all semester. Crazy, right?

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Susan Kelley
Susan Kelley

Written by Susan Kelley

Susan is a runner, a mom of 3 grown children, and an avid traveler. She writes about humans, and wrote a book about false accusations of sexual assault.

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