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This week, Spotify just dropped its annual Spotify-wrapped feature that allows us to judge our friends’ taste in music if they’re brave enough to share. Seeing the albums, songs, and music genres I’ve enjoyed over the past 12 months (apparently, May was all about “Serotonin Vogue Strut” for me – whatever that means!) gave me space to reflect on a few of the love lessons I’ve learned in 2024.
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While this wasn’t a big dating year for me – I can count the dates I went on with one hand – I still experienced a lot of personal growth. I learned how to better trust my intuition and honour my boundaries. Through this, I healed some old wounds. I’m excited to go into 2025 and put my sharpened dating skills into practice.
If you are currently dating or like me, gearing up to date more in 2025, here are a few things that have helped me.
1. Go slow.
In 2024 I practised, what I call, mindful dating. Instead of leading with the physical as I have in the past, I go out with people, listen carefully to what they say, and then make a clear assessment of who they are as a person before I sleep with them. Revolutionary, I know! While I’m not suggesting every romance needs to move at the pace of a Jane Austen novel, there’s something to be said about giving a connection space to breathe so you can carefully consider someone’s characters without throwing hormones into the mix.
2. Honour your boundaries.
Part of being a mindful dater is noticing when someone makes you uncomfortable and addressing it immediately. Whether it’s an unsolicited dick pic, a sexist joke, a flaky lack of communication, or something else that gives you a serious case of the ick, I’ve stopped letting it fester. Instead, I communicate about it in the moment, or in cases where I feel unsafe (see: unwanted sexual content) I remove myself from the situation. Sometimes this means blocking the person on my phone.
3. Be decisive.
Waffling back and forth about how you feel about people wastes their time and yours. Keeping situationships or friends with benefits on the back burner “just in case” you change your mind about them clutters your dating life. In 2024, I’m proud of the moments when I listened to my intuition and made definitive decisions about romantic interests. Sometimes this meant acknowledging that I’ll never love a certain person as more than a friend. Other times it involved severing ties with a person altogether. When it comes to dating, if it’s not a hard “yes” it’s a no.
4. You can have an evolving relationship with yourself and still be worthy of love and romance.
Years ago, I dated a man who told me point-blank that I didn’t love myself enough. This was his justification for breaking things off with me in the most cruel way possible – by lying about cheating on me (a story for another time!) I spent more time than I’d like to admit thinking that the breakup was somehow my fault. I made it my mission to learn to love myself as deeply as possible.
It took falling in love with myself to understand that I was always worthy of love and kindness and this man was just projecting his insecurities on me. While you have to have a certain degree of self-love before you can love someone else (at least in a healthy way), having the right people around you makes this much easier.
5. Allow yourself to get uncomfortable.
While it would be great if we could all meet the love of our life without leaving our sofa and comfiest pair of pajamas, that’s generally not how things go. A butterfly must emerge from the cocoon to spread their wings. Putting yourself out there and allowing yourself to be vulnerable can feel incredibly uncomfortable, but it’s necessary if you want to connect with other humans. Stop holding yourself back. To quote a line from one of my favourite holiday movies, “You’ll never find the warmth if you don’t venture out in the cold.”