I hate to break it to you, but what you’re doing is not dating.

What you’re doing is distracting yourself, and that’s ok, but it’s important to take a second to recognise the difference even it’s just for your own acceptance.

When you’re not ready to date with a purpose, you can use the time wisely to distract yourself until you are. Distract yourself from the person you’re trying to get over and heal from until all of a sudden you realise that you aren’t thinking about them every day, they aren’t infiltrating your dreams anymore and you’re no longer using them as a point of reference when you’re talking about your love life.

If it takes a new body every weekend to erase the person you’re getting over, then that’s totally fine. But please for the love of god … do not call that dating!

 Dating means opening up and actually letting another person get to know you … the good and the bad (scary I know, because that means you have to accept that other people might think you’re not perfect 100% of the time).

To be honest, a form of pretending to date is going to hang out with someone for the first time with the intention of sleeping with them, because let’s be honest, you’re not that bothered about spending time genuinely getting to know them and understanding what makes them tick if you’re already planning to get them naked halfway through your ‘date‘.

When you’re ready and in your own time, you’ll find someone who’s worth dating and I mean really dating. Someone who you’re excited to get to know more about and you don’t mind hanging out with on occasions where you don’t end up having sex, but you see each other just because you want to.

But until then, go through your list of people who you want to get to know physically but not mentally, you might as well have fun while you’re trying to block the void of space that your last relationship has left.

Just take a second to remember, when you talk about how your dating life is going so unsuccessfully, it’s probably because you’re not actually dating.

When you’re mentally ready to date someone you’ll find everything happening a lot easier, a connection will feel less forced and you’ll feel like you’ve come away from ‘dates’ with something more than just an orgasm.