Here’s the second installment of an Asheville dating manifesto which came out of a conversation started by Laura Hope-Gill. The local poet started talking about dating in Asheville via her public Twitter account. The first installment was a conversation. This follow-up is more of Hope-Gill’s stream of consciousness:
@jenneraustin I agree. There’s so much that’s good in it. We just lost the rites of it.
@SwoodLady What if it didn’t have to suck? What if we approached it as practice of self-reflection and discovery rather than demand?
@SwoodLady Funny. And what alternative is there? Fast and furious, devastation and denial?
@KCGibbons : ) Takes time.
And measured and takes times to be listened to.
And it is slow.
But the heart only has its rhythm.
Tech speeds everything up.
It is not the same as the rhythm of the culture we live in.
Love has a rhythm comprised of the rhythms of the people feeling it.
We wake up inside relationships wondering how we got there, how do we get out?
In our most honest hearts, we are all fragile. The loss of dating in our culture endangers us.
And people deserve to be known as people, not place-fillers.
It takes time to get to know someone.
We are not cats. We don’t just get another one like us at the petstore. Maybe even cats don’t like each other.
We hurt one another unnecessarily because everything goes so quickly.
We’ve lost a sense of innocence. We disregard our emotional rhythms. #datingmanifesto
. . . and we don’t really like them. They’re stressful, and they make us change into people we’re not.
Instant Relationships have become the norm . . .
Some ideas on why we need a dating renaissance (thanks @bookish_type for conversation!):