Happy Sunday Canna Fam. I asked what you guys wanted to read about and dating during a pandemic was the second topic chosen. While I can completely understand this being a topic people would want to read, I am going to give a fair warning that I may not be the best person to write about this. I dated somebody for about a month during the 2020 pandemic year, and that relationship was an epic fail, so I can definitely fill you in on what not to do. What a weird time in the world to try to date! Would you have ever thought you would be going on a first date with someone someday wearing a mask for part of it? Or say you already have somebody you are dating and want to kiss them in public, you are now kissing mask to mask my friend. Weird times for sure! However, I think this pandemic has given us an opportunity to step out of our comfort zone in many ways. A lot of people who have previously enjoyed their alone time, may be finding now that they are just getting way too much of it and are ready to meet somebody. On the other hand, you have people who have probably never spent any time alone, and this pandemic has maybe been just what that person needed to work on their own self-love before they try to love somebody else.
This pandemic has opened the online dating world up more than ever. I do not know about you guys, but I am personally not a huge fan of online dating. Have I used dating apps? Absolutely! Do I advise them to find your one true love? Not necessarily. Now this definitely depends on the person, as I am sure for some of us, online dating is extremely helpful. However, if you are someone like me who enjoys meeting people face to face and having in person conversations, then you probably do not get as much out of talking to someone behind your screen of your phone or computer. Just recently, I had the pleasure of being introduced to somebody by a family friend of mine and there is something to say about meeting somebody that someone already knows you will most likely vibe with. Talking to people online based off a photo and a usually awkward bio just isn’t always the most successful. I always used to get frustrated with the lack of intellectual stimulation in the conversation and would end up quickly finding an excuse to exit the chat. To those of you who have managed to find your soulmate through online dating, more power to you guys! I am impressed, and insanely happy for you as a lot of us end up wasting our time or other’s time. Now, I know with covid slowly decreasing and a lot of us getting vaccinated, things will start to feel somewhat normal again and we may be able to meet people out and about someday without half our faces covered. What do we do in the meantime though?
For me personally, I am the type of person who puts my career number one when I am single. I invest my time and energy into what I know is going to give back and benefit my life, and sometimes that is not always other people. This can be a challenge though if you do find yourself wanting to date, and especially if you are not trying to mix business and pleasure within the same industry. Once again, I applaud those who are successful at this, but I have learned for my own personal preferences that dating someone within my career causes me to never turn work off. I find myself talking about work with that other person after work hours, and it just starts to feel like my relationship is another job. In my very recent experiences, dating somebody who is not in my industry has been extremely rewarding. When I am working at 11pm on a Saturday night, I will now be encouraged to rest and enjoy my weekend and focus on myself and Copper, versus having somebody who cheers my workaholic habits on because they are also caught up in work 24/7. The cannabis industry in particular, because we are dealing with live plants, is one that hardly ever stops. Sometimes you need to find that balance for yourself, whatever that looks like, and during this pandemic I realized what that looks like for me.
Now if you guys were already in a relationship when the pandemic started, you probably learned quick how much you could stand being around that person practically ALL the time. For some of you, your relationships may have ended during the pandemic because of being in too close proximities with your significant other for too long. In addition to being in each other’s space all the time, the pandemic caused a lot of other tough situations to face. People are now dealing with potential financial issues, death of loved ones due to COVID, not being able to travel to see family. There were a lot of factors that come in to play when we are looking at the survival of relationships. I think dating during a pandemic is much harder, but as it should be. During such a tough time in the world, I think people should consider whether dating is really for them during a pandemic. It is hard enough for some of us to keep ourselves happy and afloat on our own, let alone having to worry about a whole other person as well. For some of you, it may be the perfect time to date, or you may have not even experienced many changes during Covid. With us being an essential industry, we have been extremely blessed to get to continue working (minus the extensive travel for most). Overall, just know yourself and where your head is at with all the stress the pandemic has brought and make an educated decision from there on if dating is right for you right now.
I am going to close by saying, maybe try not to take dating so seriously…. When you put a ton of pressure on something to work out, it tends to go in the opposite direction you would like it to go. I absolutely know this from experience too. I have started to shift my thinking from, “I really want to build my life with someone and hope this works out” to “I am going to continue building my life for myself, and I hope it aligns with someone else building theirs as well”. People are ultimately going to live their life for them, and you should not expect somebody to revolve their life around yours. Find somebody who brings you balance and motivates you but stays in their own lane and you stay in yours. Or you can find whatever the hell you want and what makes you happy, and that works too. I just have noticed that the less pressure I put on something to work out, the more it usually does. Nobody is ever going to be perfect for us, but if you can learn how to appreciate what you have and fill your own cup until it is overflowing, then you can tend to fill your partner’s cup with the extra and everything turns out pretty great in the end.
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