I’ve been seeing people talk about Lori Harvey, and as much as I love seeing young women date around and have fun, it’s made me think about the women that lost their youth to the patriarchy. I’m glad women in my generation are choosing to live out their twenties, but women from patriachial and religious families don’t realize how much they’ve been brainwashed to center their lives around invisible husbands.

The idea that we are allowed and should be dating multiple men is a hard one to accept. This apprehension comes from patriarchal conditioning that believes that we belong to our future spouses and should keep our bodies “pure” through a lack of dating and experiences. It only serves men because they won’t have to worry about having competition especially with a man more HV than them.

It reinforces the idea that we are just cattle to be handed off when dating should be about exploring, meeting new people, and getting to know yourself and your needs better. The goal should never be to find a man, but to find yourself. Find your integrity, your voice, your likes, your dislikes, your style etc. Stop making dating a chore because you see it as a game with a final level instead take each date and each person you meet with a grain of salt. If it works out great, if it doesn’t, oh well.

I just need women to start centering their dating around their pleasure because it really shouldn’t be as anxiety inducing as we allow it to be. If dating only gives you headaches and stress, analyze what your fixating on, what behavior your allowing around you, and what your end goal is. If any of these thing are centered around or connected to men, find a way to make dating about you. Remember you are the prize and because of that you get to be selfish.