Cut Out Conceptual Dating
February 5th, 2025
Writer: Chloe Pehote
Editor: Hannah Bernardi
If there is one thing that the college experience has given me, aside from a fruitful higher education, it is a more complex understanding of myself. Like many teenage girls, I spent high school navigating a good amount of insecurity, social media, and relationship-fueled identity crises. It was not until I could lead an independent lifestyle during college that I developed a more multiplex sense of self.
After three years of living on my own, seeking out people and environments that inspire me, and figuring out what early adulthood is defined by, I feel as though I have a strong grasp on what makes me, “me.” While I would never deny that I am still a hodgepodge of the experiences and relationships that have come before me, I’ve noticed that the attributes of my past I cling to are the memories I cherish, less the trends, fads, and phenomena that captivated people I admired at the time.
What is so special about this growth is that the people I love most in my life have come to love me as a person I am proud of being, just as I do for them. At my best and my worst, my strongest relationships–my closest female friendships–reflect a mutual embrace of strengths, weaknesses, quirks, interests, passions, and motivations. It is this shared understanding that has made these relationships so abundant, and so different from those that are more surface-level and transactional.
More recently, the gratitude I have for both my newfound self-understanding, as well as the strength of the relationships that I do have, has illuminated an issue I have with early adulthood romance, particularly within the highly social college environments I occupy: conceptual dating.
I define this term based on a meme I have seen rotating on social media platforms in which, mostly women, have expressed the sentiment that previous partners have “liked them better as a concept.” Thus implying that they were more worthy of attention and attraction before revealing their more complex qualities. In terms of my observations and experiences, I feel as though this phenomenon implies that there are many women out there who do not feel seen, heard, or understood by their partners beyond their conceptual value, whether that be their social status, their conventional attractiveness, or how “fun” they are to be around. While these are all, to a certain degree, components of attraction, I feel as though it has not become uncommon, as women, to dilute our personalities to appease the partner we are attempting to secure the interest of, to fulfill the “concept” of a relationship sans receipt of appreciation for one’s multi-faceted character. While this is certainly not the case for everyone or in every situation, I cannot help but wonder if, as young adults at a “party school,” in search of romantic relationships we have lost the meaning of true connection.
In light of this, I urge readers to reflect, “Does the man you are so upset about even know you?” Well, that is, know you beyond your go-to drink order or the date of your sorority formal. Almost naively, I hope that my obsession with this plague of modern dating is merely a reflection of my social circle’s poor dating experience. But in all honesty, I think the feeling of being misunderstood or the yearning to minimize one’s personality to appear “not too much” has impacted us all more than we care to admit.
Despite how proud I am of how far I have come in terms of confidence in my identity, I still fear that I am impacted by a sense of shame that looms over the desire to share the parts of ourselves that our close relationships admire most. Because of this, I aim to remind both you and myself that prodigious levels of emotion and empathy are what make us human, dramatics are what makes life interesting, and niche obsessions and interests are what make us unique. And so in the same way that your friends and family have come to love and appreciate you dearly for your hidden quirks, there will one day be a partner that does the same. Well, that is, if you choose to cut out conceptual dating.
Photo Credits: Libby Zufi
