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That we forget too often.

Modern dating sometimes feels like a minefield.

It feels like exploring new territory without a map, like trying to find our way in a dark, unfamiliar house just by sense of touch.

But despite how lost we feel, there are some common landmarks that remind us we’re not treading such unfamiliar waters after all. In the end, we’re all in the same boat.

We all have a past

We all have exes, a history, and baggage.

We all have reasons to mistrust the opposite (or the same) sex. We can all begin sentences with “men always,” or “women never.”

If we wanted to, we could spend date after date turning our past dating woes into topics of conversation — a conversation that seems vulnerable and honest on the surface, but that’s actually empty of substance deep down. Sometimes, that’s exactly what we do.

But we’re not as good at accepting that other people also have baggage. We expect them to have all their issues figured out and/or neatly stored away out of sight from the moment we meet.

We hate low-effort dating…

It doesn’t matter how much you hate it, low-effort dating is a staple amongst 21st-century dating trends.

Low-effort dating is all about minimizing effort and maximizing rewards. It’s all about swapping for a last-minute Friday night date and settling for the first person within a certain mile-range who says yes. It’s about skipping the romantic dinners and moving straight to Netflix and chill like a couple who’s been together for ten years and has long since stopped caring.

Low-effort dating is all about refusing to text first, to do any real pursuing, to do your best not to care so you’re not heartbroken when it eventually ends. It’s about going for convenience over feeling, and practicality over standards.

Low-effort dating inspires you to back away at the first sign of trouble, to bail instead of working in the relationship, and to only stay while the honeymoon phase lasts.

We hate low-effort dating because it makes us feel like that discount item next to the cashier at the grocery store, something someone picked just because it was there and available for cheap. It makes us feel like an afterthought, as if we’re not worth the trouble.

…but sooner or later we all engage in it

We hate the notion that putting effort into dating has become that unfashionable, but sooner or later, we all give up and give in. We low-effort date because we’re tired of running on the dating treadmill and getting nowhere. We’re exhausted from getting our hopes up just to see them come crashing down. We need a break from all of this, but we don’t know how to give ourselves one so we carry on taking shortcuts.

We look at the prospect of a 20 min drive to go on a dinner date and shudder, our favorite places for first dates become any bar within two blocks from our home. We ghost to avoid difficult conversations, we block so we don’t have to deal, we don’t even spend the energy to pretend we’re too busy.

We make the exact mistakes we despise so much, and fall beneath our own standards because we are not perfect. There’s only so much pressure we can take before we crack.

The good news is, despite the fact that you might slip sometimes, you do not have to blindly follow the herd. If you believe you’re worth the effort, starting putting in some effort.

We know luck plays a major role in finding love…

When we’re single, we see a happy couple and recognize how lucky they are to have found each other.

We watch romcoms and The Office reruns and logically, rationally, we understand those couples have one in a million shot of meeting and working it out. We know that for every fictional Jim that gets his Pam there are countless real-life Jims forever stuck in the friendzone; for every fictional Pam that gets a guy as devoted as Jim, there are countless real-life Pams who don't get a second — let alone a third — chance at the wonderful guy they’ve thoughtlessly turned down.

… but we don’t like to think we depend on luck to find a soulmate

We know luck plays a major role in finding love, but we somehow refuse to accept it has any real influence over our romantic lives.

When it comes to our own love life, we forget about luck entirely. There’s no room for luck because we deserve a happy ending — that’s how it’s supposed to be, that’s how it’s written in the stars.

With the right attitude, we can all be Jim and Pam. Our real life story can be exactly like their fictitious one.

So we try to manufacture our happily ever after. We read every how-to article available online, we buy dating books, and listen to podcasts. We attend workshops and watch Ted Talks, we dissect our dating lives with our friends and engage a therapist in an attempt to fix whatever is wrong with us that’s making us “still single.”

While you could probably use that therapy regardless of the state of your love life, it doesn’t hurt to remind yourself you can’t self-improve a suitable partner into existence. Working on yourself to become a better person is a noble goal, but no amount of self-work will guarantee the right person will pop up into your life.

Some people get incredibly lucky in love, some do not. That’s not a reason to give up, but it should be an incentive to stop feeling like such a failure for being single, and to start setting up new measures of personal success.