By Ravid Yosef for YourTango.
I made this mistake, but YOU don’t have to.
We spend our 20s thinking we have nothing but time. All the serious stuff like marriage and kids are now happening later in life, so we feel like we can concentrate on other things while we’re young.
Love wasn’t a priority.
I spent my 20s focusing on my career. I was passionate about music, and at 20 years old, I accepted a job as a Junior Digital Marketing Manager at Interscope Records. I went from a Junior to an Executive in less than 4 years, and my dedication to my work paid off.
Love wasn’t a priority, but I still wanted some companionship from time to time. I dated here and there but never seriously. I choose looks over substance and influence over kindness in my men. I knew these guys were no good, but I kept dating them because I figured I had plenty of time for the serious types later in life. “It’s not like I’m going to marry him,” I’d tell myself and others who asked. “I’m not in a rush, and I’m just having fun.”
My life dramatically changed.
And it was all fun and games until I woke up at 30 years old and was diagnosed with cancer, which forced me to think about what I really wanted.
When I was ready to get serious and settle down, I began dating aggressively, but things weren’t clicking. The men I was attracted to weren’t ready for a relationship, and I was distant with the men who were ready.
It took me months to figure it out, but I finally realised I had made what was truly the biggest mistake of my 20s: I spent a decade building bad dating habits that weren’t as easy to break as I expected when I was actually ready for something serious.
I thought that, once I was ready, everything would fall into place, but I was wrong. Suddenly, I had to battle with patterns I created, walls that I built and the bad taste in men that I developed over the years.
It's true that our 20s are a time when we shouldn’t worry as much about our future. We should experiment and have fun, but we must do so while knowing that it’s a vital time in our life where we are practising for our future.
In our 20s, we're establishing our boundaries of how we relate to others and the type of romantic life we want. If, in our 20s, we're practising being distant, emotionally unavailable and dating jerks, guess what? In our 30s, we turn out distant, emotionally unavailable and still dating assholes.
