I Dated Myself For A Day And It Was Awesome!

Gonna love myself, no, I don't need anybody else!

Dear Friend,

Via instagram.com

I’m Mikael, just your typical 20-something year old hopeless romantic, living in a city of about 2.6 million people, looking for love.

Warner Bros. Pictures

After long summer days of “are they going to text me?”, “should I text them?”, “is this going anywhere”, “why am I still single?!”, I’ve realized that my love life is dryer than the drought in A Cinderella Story.

But alas, eventually that drought has to end. Until that faithful day comes where I can find someone to go on picnics with at the park, drinking red wine, listening to good music and just enjoying the company of each other, I will sit here cuddling my pillow watching The Mindy Project .

Until, one Sunday morning during my usually jog my iPhone just happened to implant the greatest idea of all time. Hailee Steinfeld’s Love Myself came on and it actually made me think. If I really want someone to go on cute dates with why don’t I just go with myself? I mean I know I’m faithful, I have loads of ambition, and I know that on a good day I can totally peak around 7.5 / 10 on the attractive scale. From there I ran back home, shower, and asked myself out (luckily I said yes!).

I’m a huge cheeseball, because I like to love and think it’s healthy to express love. Like I’m the type of guy who when asked “what’s your favourite colour?” would respond with “the colour of your eyes”. So I knew I wanted to start my date by doing something sweet right off the bat as a treat to myself for being true to who I am.

I started to think about the things that make me happy, because if anything a date should be an experience in which you allow someone to make you happy as you take the time to get to know them. Thus, I turned to my strong love for music to guide my way to love.

As I began to venture off on a quest of self discover and what love really means I realized that there are so many signs of love in everyday life, literal signs.

Puns aside, why is it so frowned upon to take yourself on a little date and adventure? How can we expect to let someone in our own life, if we don’t even have a true sense of who we are as independent people? I decided to buy this plant as a reminder to take care of myself first and continue to grow, because I AM AN INDEPENDENT YOUNG ADULT WHO DON’T NEED NOBODY!

Among my other purchases I decided to buy these sunglasses that were very out of my comfort zone in terms of style. I thought to myself, if I’m going to treat myself to a date, I’ve got to do things that force me to learn more about myself.

That’s when I happened to stumble upon this psychic shop. At first I was like, “would you really go to a psychic on a date?” and then I remembered “this is my date and I’m going to do whatever I want to do!”

I took a chance and dare I say that going to a psychic was probably one of the coolest, craziest, and most eye opening experiences I’ve ever happened to just do out of the blue!

AND BOY WAS I SHOOK! This psychic knew virtually everything about me, especially my LOVE LIFE! She called me out on my summer of trying to find love, claiming that “what I feel isn’t sometimes what I express to people.” She went on to mention people who I had some emotional connections with in the past / recently and how apparently I’m blocking the wrong people out of my love life. I DON’T KNOW MAN BUT IT WAS SCARY AND IT WAS LIKE SHE KNEW ME.

After having been read, I had a complete new perspective on things. Not only did I think more about my feelings and how I express them, but I thought perhaps I already have all the love I could need and I’m just not seeing it. Sure it’s nice to look around and hope that the hottie that you see on the street will fall madly in love with you, however there are people in your life currently who already love you for you, and you didn’t even have to take them on a date!

Continuing on with my date I thought I should do something to remember this special moment forever. There just so happened to be a tattoo shop a few doors down, sadly they didn’t have a walk in appointment. I had to think fast, what else would be fun to do on a date?

And then I saw the most magical thing in my whole entire life, a SURFING MACHINE! Not only had I never been surfing, I certainly hadn’t thought that my first time would be in the city! But I thought “Hey, when in Rome!”

No surprise I was absolutely dreadful at surfing, but how many people can say they went to a psychic and went surfing all in one day as part of a date?! Not many, I can tell you that.

At some point a date calls for a little romance and quality food. Now I am no master chef but I certainly enjoy to cook, especially when it comes to having guests over. But when it comes to my own meals sometimes I tend to rush them because the only person who can judge the quality of my cooking at that point is me. So this time round I thought I’d go the extra mile and treat myself by going all out.

To end off the night, I invited a few friends over to discuss my discoveries. As fun as the idea of dates may seem, I’m surprised that more people don’t take themselves on dates - it’s awesome! You don’t have to impress anyone else but yourself, you can do what you really want to do, and you can learn to enjoy spending time with someone who’s going to be with you for the rest of your life (literally your stuck with yourself forever so get use to it).

But hey even if you don't want to date yourself you can always go out with some friends and do something fun. If anything here's what I learned:

1. A date is something that should make you happy and is an opportunity to learn something new about a person (in this case yourself).

2. Learn to take yourself on dates often, because at the end of the day you're stuck with yourself for life so you may as well have fun with it.

3. Go outside of your comfort zone. I would never have thought to see a psychic, go surfing, get a random tattoo, buy random things, and make myself a fancy dinner all in the same day, but it turned out to be so much fun!

4. Love is expressed in different ways everywhere. Your friends love you for you and sometimes you gotta realize all the love around you is just as satisfying as giving piggybacks to a significant other on a moonlit night.

5. Psychics are crazy, but they somehow say the things you need to hear the most. I mean I for one didn't realize I was blocking people out or that how I feel is sometimes not expressed clearly through my words.

Republic Records

With all that said in done I hope you got something out of this just as much as I did. If anything, just remember the wise words of Haliee Steinfeld: