“I’ve wasted so much time dating, the years I should have been chasing something else.”
A friend nearing 30 is frustrated with her past choices.
Women in their 20s blossom like flowers opening for the first time, petals catching sunlight with a mix of shyness and curiosity. Half-bold, half-innocent, they carry both sweetness and fire, drawing in bees and sometimes, unexpected visitors too.
The flowers were eager to be noticed in a garden full of roses, lilies, and wild blooms, each encounter carrying the thrill of adventure and the sparkle of what-ifs.
We grew up believing there was a playbook for everything. A curriculum to follow: study hard to get good grades, get good grades to get into the right school, get into the right school to land the right job, get the right job to climb the ladder with promotions.
We entered our 20s carrying so much hope for the future, the possibilities, the adventures, the unknowns that felt just within reach. Until the curriculum fails.
We lived our lives relying on past datasets, shortcuts handed to us as if they held all the answers. But suddenly, those datasets are outdated. New variables appear, and the old models no longer predict the future.
Still, some of us are trying to rationalize the world we’re in. Some of us are trying to project our own patterns onto it. Both are ways of making sense of uncertainty, of holding onto a narrative when the old one no longer fits.
Living between the old and the new isn’t easy. Suddenly, the guidance we once craved feels obsolete, while the new rules are still too raw, too unformed. In the middle of it all, we search for a place to stand, a place where we belong, and where comfort doesn’t feel fleeting.
And sometimes, we convince ourselves that comfort can be found in a person.
“Dating is the worst ROI thing you can do.”
That’s what a friend in a six-year relationship said to me, frustrated at how many of her girlfriends spend their best energy on dating instead of their careers.
Can you really blame them? It’s only natural for a flower to stir with excitement at every visitor after her petals have been hidden for so long. And for every guest who lingered, she wondered if maybe this time, she was enough to make them stay.
But sometimes the flower forgets what she truly needs: the steady water and soil. She is meant to be nurtured and tended if she is to flourish beyond a single season.
We were so used to following the curriculum, believing it would make us worthy of love. And when we hit a wall, we began to wonder why, after all those years of trying, we still weren’t enough.
And we panic.
“I just want someone to fight for me, you know.”
Maybe the flower must learn that staying is a choice, and that she must choose herself again, and again.
“There might be millions of roses in the whole world, but you’re my only one, unique rose.” — The Little Prince
