Great news! You just met someone new, and now you guys are talking. Bad news! You just met someone new, and now you guys are talking.

The talking stage always goes one of two ways: it’s either a time of pure bliss, where you’re getting to know the basics about this person you’re soon to fall for, or it’s a complete deadend, an energy vampire. 

This getting-to-know-you stage holds the potential to be such a beautiful moment, one the two of you will look back on fondly as your relationship continues to progress. “Remember our second date, when you spilled coffee on the barista, and we laughed so hard we had to leave the cafe?” “Remember how dorky your pick-up lines were?” “Remember the way you asked me to be your girlfriend, when you went outside and yelled off the roof of your apartment that you loved me?” The wedding vows begin with the talking stage.

But, on the other hand, the talking stage holds the potential to be your next villain origin story. Proceed with caution: there’s potential danger ahead. 

The economics of the talking stage

I subscribe to the ideology that we’re only meant to know so many people. We’re only meant to have so many connections. Every time a new person joins your collective, you have to budget a certain amount of your emotional currency to them. Eventually, for the majority of us, we’re going to go psychologically bankrupt. And talking stages seem to be particularly expensive. 

As a whole, we’re entering a particularly strict era of spending. We go into talking stages hoping for a relationship, but we can’t be bothered to fully invest in them. And why should we? They so often end in the same way: usually, we just end up gaining an Instagram follower, and, if we’re lucky, a consistent story liker. 

Where does the cycle start? Does it start with us not investing, or do we not invest because talking stages so often fail?

I’ll say this until the day I die: social media ruined romance. I talk more about this here, but the TL;DR is: we’re so used to seeing all the other options out there, we don’t want to settle for anyone because we constantly think there’s better out there for us. 

But I also think we want to find true love so badly and so desperately, we’re hoping talking stages can be that for us without having to put so much work into them. We’re hoping that the next person we have a little fling with  is going to have flowers sent to our jobs and have our names tattooed on them. 

Getting to know someone takes work. It takes time. It takes effort. And for a lot of us, we don’t have these resources readily available to give. So we’re cutting corners. We’re contributing the minimum, hoping the other person is going to overcompensate. And they often don’t. So then we find ourselves entertaining people we don’t care about and people who don’t care very much about us. 

But, at the same time, it’s nice talking to them. It’s nice waking up to texts from them. It’s nice getting to see them every weekend. But why? Is it nice because you like them, or is it nice because you don’t have to be alone?

And that’s the age-old question, huh?

The Intentions Behind the Talking Stage

It’s nice for a while. It’s easy to think you like this person because you like the attention. You like being desired. You like being an exciting part of someone’s life. And, to an extent, you probably enjoy desiring someone else. You enjoy being excited about this new addition to your life. 

But it doesn’t take long for monotony to settle into the cracks of your regular conversations. Routine is great when it accompanies someone you actually like. When you don’t really like them, this is when the conventional becomes mundane. In a relationship, you love consistency. You love the life you build with another person. That routine is where comfortability thrives. But in a talking stage (that was clearly never going to go anywhere anyway), this is where the boredom starts. And when the boredom begins, the talking stage ends.

And so, just like that, you’ve racked up another Instagram follower that means little more to you than that. 

But then, as the days go on without a ‘good morning’ text, you start getting bored again. You start to crave that little spark, that little fling that adds a touch of color to your life (even if the color is poop brown or grab-the-gun gray–is gray a color?).

Is it better to be bored and alone? Or should we always be kind of leading someone on?

So is boredom the thing that’s driving (and, consequently, halting) our love lives? Or do we start with good intentions, only to have our minds completely numbed by dull conversation?

But, in the meantime, while we figure this out, why don’t we hop into another round of ‘are we just talking, or are we just vaguely entertaining each other’s presence until one of us gets bored’?