Lets Not Get To Know Each Other! 

I don’t know if anyone here read the recent Modern Love College Essay Runner-Up about, “Why Spoil Great Sex by Dating?” (thanks for sending this one, Dr. Leah!).

Joel Walkowski, a senior at the University of Southern California, writes that:

“We might dally in the land of easy sex and stilted text-message flirtation, but deep down we crave the warm embrace of all-consuming love.”

“Out of fear, we shrink ourselves,” he says. “There have been many times I should have cried but stifled the tears. Instances where I should have said, ‘I love you’ but made a joke instead.”

As a single parent, especially, falling in love can be so scary. What if you get hurt? What if you fall so deeply that you can’t remember your way home?

Although Joel is a college senior — not a single parent — his words really resonated with me: “But I do occasionally wonder: If we can’t get past ourselves and learn to sacrifice to be with another, then what is in store?...An era of loneliness filled with commercial wants and mate selection based on the shallowest of criteria?”

Dad’s House writes about loneliness and single parents today, saying that while booty calls meet, uh, certain needs, “infusing unconditional love into an intimate relationship – for me, that’s the missing link.”

I also love this older post by divorced mom Kat Wilder, who writes about how much it hurts to fall in love — and then walk away from it.

Have you ever longed to feel close to someone — to feel that rush of pleasure that comes with touching — that you got lost? I have.

I’ve also thought that sex would lead to happiness and fulfillment. Have you?