I feel like it needed to mention the time it really takes to get to know someone, which is almost a year. I've rushed into relationships before and got hurt when I realized that I was dating a completely different person.
Also, believe their friends and family when they air some shit. It's so easy to brush it off as lying or exaggerating for the sake of keeping the relationship, only for it to resurface when the honey moon phase wanes.
What shit have you heard from friends and family? On my experience they’re not necessarily sharing that kind of information directly with me. I do pay close attention to how they talk about their exes though.
Yeah, you got it, stuff about their exes, brothers complaining that "they're like that", family asking weird questions that only make sense in hindsight, someone sharing a slightly different versions of the story you were told that sounds a lot more compromising than you remember.
As I get older I more and more have a problem with #1, I don't like a lot of people.
Of course, there's a small percentage I percieve as interesting. But they also need to see me as interesting, be available, need to be open to dating, agree on finding out if we. match before committing, have at least a bit of fun with my sexual kinks, have healthy relationship patterns, have polical views in a way we wouldn't fight about etc. etc.
If each of these factors has a probability we can multiply them to get the overall probability of me dating successfully.
That's my personal Drake Equation of dating successfully. When I was younger, some of these factors looked different, I was less selecting (liked more people) and I would ignore a lot of my needs and wants.
Like the original https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation, which predicts it's really really improbable to find alien life, my personal Drake Equation Of Dating says it's nowadays. mostly improbable I'll find a woman I want to be with.
I think a few more factors are important to me nowadays, and even when I'm willing to compromise in a lot of others - I'm currently not really believing it's worth the effort anymore.