The More Amazing You Are, The Smaller The Dating Pool Becomes – Here’s Why

While there are plenty of fish in the sea, none of those fish seem worth reeling in once you start believing all those morning mantras you’ve told yourself for years. Does self-love and security equal a lifetime alone? Hell no, but because you’ve risen on the scale of one to 10, your number of potential Tinder matches has started to scale down.

  1. You don’t fall for games. Between a career, hobbies and a jam-packed social life, you have no time to calculate how many hours you need to wait to text back. You know you’re not desperate, so you’re never worried about coming off as such. Guys who purposely push your buttons just to see how you react will only get one reaction: silence.
  2. You make some men feel inferior. There’s a decently sized portion of the dating pool of men who are single because women literally scare them. Talking a lot or picking up the tab for drinks will bring out all the insecurities they typically masked behind too much cologne. Don’t let their fear of a secure woman bring you down. It’s their loss.
  3. You won’t put out right away. Sexpectations don’t end after graduation. If you’re a girl who wants to wait to see how serious a guy is about you, a lot of them will show you very quickly that they’re not. You’re not saving yourself for marriage or anything, but a guy has to earn it.
  4. You don’t let guys feel like they have a hold on you. Some men do this cute thing where they try to get you to cancel your plans to see them. It’s a silly game they play to tend to their fragile egos and see just how far you’re willing to go to please them. When you tell them that you’re not going to cancel drinks with Sara because they want to Netflix and chill, that bruised ego might be too much to recover from. Oh well!
  5. There aren’t a lot of men who are on your level career-wise. Society is different now, and people aren’t following career paths in quite the same way. You might be moving on to a managerial position at your job while the population of men around you are working at Burger King and trying to get more subscribers to their YouTube channels. It’s not always your fault.
  6. There’s not a lot of men who are on your level finance-wise. One of the best things a girl could ever do for herself is to become financially independent. However, there are a lot of 20-, and even 30-somethings who are still getting their cell phone bills paid by their parents. Money isn’t everything, but being the breadwinner could definitely drive some men away.
  7. You’re very sure of what you don’t want. Dating can be an exhausting merry-go-round of men you would never want to bring home to Mama, but it takes dating a dud to know he’s a dud. Your perspective of the guys you put on a pedestal in 10th-grade has probably changed quite dramatically. So it only makes sense that the kind of guy you actually want gets more and more specific with the more men you see.
  8. You’re comfortable being on your own. Too many girls settle for toxic men because they just don’t know how to be happy being alone. Once you’ve found that inner peace and love for the freedom that comes with being single, you’re not in a huge rush to let it all go. In fact, you’re a lot less concerned with ending up alone. The real fear is ending up with the wrong person.
  9. You’re growing up. When you get older, your priorities change. You become less interested in the hot, cool guy that all the ladies are getting googly-eyed over and much more interested in the cute, fun guy who remembers pretty much every story you’ve ever told him. Growing up means that you stop being phased by things that aren’t real or genuine. You’re after something authentic and real — and therefore harder to find.
  10. You’re not desperate enough to settle. Gone are the days where you get all anxious over a guy you don’t even like that much. You’re done building people up in your head, and you’re capable of seeing them for exactly who they are. You trust your instincts when they tell you “no,” and so they’ll probably tell you “no” more often. But just because your dating pool seems to be drying up doesn’t mean you’ll end up empty. Bad things clear out of your life to make room for the good. So don’t fight it, and just let it be.
Emily is a writer, dog mom, and occasional narcissist living in what her mom refers to as “a bubble.” Geographically speaking, it’s more like Daytona Beach, Florida. A graduate of the University of Central Florida, she is a community editor for a local newspaper and spends most of her time trying to convince her dog to cuddle.
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