When You Should Take a Dating Break

There is a time and a place for everything.

Consequently, for everything, there is a time when it should be set aside. Because let’s face it; sometimes the time just isn’t right and you just don’t need any more stress or distractions in your life.

When we’ve been a long time searching for romance without success, we often experience a kind of burnout. Whether it’s the emotional roller-coaster of short-lived, ill-fated relationships, or the steady discouragement of never getting to that first date in the first place, we may reach a point where we’re simply exhausted by the experience itself. We feel like we’ll be stuck in this same rut forever.

Or it may manifest in other ways; not in a dreary discouragement, but a kind of panic that makes us fear that time is running out, that we may have missed our shot, that perhaps we’re simply being too picky, and so on.

Whether you feel exhausted by disappointment or panicked, if you feel you need to have a romantic relationship, or that the ‘looking for love’ aspect of your life is taking too much of time, energy, and attention that you don’t have to spare, you probably should consider taking a break for a while.

For some of the above issues, this is simply the obvious thing to do, but for others—especially the ‘desperation’ cases—it may seem counter-intuitive: if you’re desperately lonely, the last thing you want to do is ‘give up’ for a while.

You may be surprised to find that it’s likely to be the healthiest thing you can do.

As anyone who has ‘dated on the rebound’ could tell you, desperation is not a good state from which to start a relationship. To feel like you have to be with someone, or with this particular person, not because of who they are but because you are afraid of the alternative is a bad foundation. It’s liable to make you ignore red flags, or pursue someone you’re not really very compatible with, or create resentment and frustration down the line as your dependence puts unreasonable demands upon the relationship.

Let yourself take time to get used to being single: to understand that you don’t have to be in a relationship and that you can survive and be happy on your own. This will allow you to choose when to enter into a relationship, rather than feeling forced into it.

In addition, the capacity to be single is itself an attractive trait. A self-possessed person, someone—male or female—who is able to walk away from a relationship if necessary is a better catch and more appealing to the other side. Not to mention, of course, that it gives you time to work on whatever other personal issues that may be holding you back.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed on the relationship front, or by life in general, simply taking a break and letting yourself be single for a while can give you a chance to rest and reset into a more comfortable, self-assured position.

So, sometimes you should take a break.

But there is another side to the coin (most coins are like that: having two sides). The danger, once you allow yourself to take a break, is that you will never feel like you are ready to start up again. In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “An infinity of excuses can be found for non-action.” The fact is, of course, that circumstances will never be perfect and life will always send obstacles your way that would make a plausible pretext for putting off the pursuit of romance.

Now, when you should stop taking a break and get back into the saddle will be different for each person. That said, there are some useful guidelines for it.

The first and most important one is simply to be honest with yourself (this is useful in many situations). If you don’t want to go back to dating, ask yourself why and seriously examine your answers. “I’m fighting an alcohol addiction, have no job, and I’m barely keeping myself together as it is,” is probably a pretty reasonable one. “I don’t have a very good job and I’m not sure I’m ready,” is not so reasonable, since that’s liable to be the case for most of your life.

Therefore it’s usually a good idea, when you resolve to take ‘time off’ to set a condition for when you will go back into the fray. This condition should be both reasonable and objective. The reasonable we touched on above: the simple question ‘would this legitimately prevent your pursuing something you were really serious about doing’? The objective aspect, however, I think is even more important. You see, it serves as a most valuable check against self-deception and the power of habit.

If you say, ‘I will start dating again when I feel I’m ready,’ you might never start.

But if you say ‘I will take six months,’ or ‘I will start dating again when I have found another job’ or ‘I will start when I have gone three months without taking a drink,’ then you have a clear deadline of when you’ll go back to dating.

This not only helps ensure you’ll actually do it, but it will grant you peace of mind during your absence. You won’t be plagued by the fear “I will never have a relationship. I will always be alone,” because you know more or less exactly when you’ll start searching again. The period of single-hood, at least of accepted single-hood, is limited by design and thus has no power to expand in your imagination to consume your whole future.

Because you shouldn’t be afraid to take a break when you need one. Sometimes the best approach to anything is simply to do nothing for a while.