Raj 🐝

Modern dating has a character problem. And I think last night perfectly illustrates why. Last Sunday, I made dinner plans with a girl for Friday at 7:30. Friday afternoon, I texted to confirm. She said we were still on. Great. I got off work, washed my car, and got ready for the evening. One problem. She still hadn’t sent me her address. At 6, I texted. Nothing. At 7, thirty minutes before our date, I called. She answered. Turns out she was out shopping for a Halloween costume with friends, preparing to hit the bars that very night. Naturally, I asked about our dinner plans. Her solution? I could join her at the bars, or she could come over to my house later. I declined. Now, here’s what fascinates me. At what point did we become so obsessed with what we don’t owe other people that we forgot how we ought to treat them? You don’t owe me affection. You don’t owe me a relationship. You don’t even owe me a second date. But surely, somewhere between personal freedom and personal responsibility, we can agree that another person’s time deserves a little consideration. We’ve cultivated a dating culture that celebrates independence, demands respect, preaches emotional maturity, and then treats basic courtesy as an extraordinary act of generosity. And we wonder why people are becoming so cynical. The tragedy isn’t that people change their minds. It’s that we’ve become increasingly comfortable disregarding others in the process. You are free to do as you please. But freedom from obligation is not freedom from moral responsibility. And if your decency disappears the moment it becomes inconvenient, perhaps it was never decency at all. Perhaps it was simply convenience.