No more Cinderella-dating!

Woohoo!
There’s a (bit of) light at the end of the tunnel!
Sort of. I guess. Maybe. A little.
Ok, probably not, but for now – still a yay moment:
No more Cinderella dating!

The Lockdown Curfew here in the Netherlands (no one allowed outside between 21:00 and 04:30) has officially been cancelled today as a decision from a recent courtcase. From today on out we’re free citizens again insofar as being able to leave the house after dark without fear of the law.

Honestly, the fact that it’s now been decided purely on a legal basis outside of actual necessity/improvements on the corona-spread numbers is obviously not a good thing, but as a single pringle, I can’t help but rejoice. Because (and I hadn’t really actively noticed this before I started dating again): 21:00 is EARLY as fuck.

Which, when it comes to dating, leads to a whole lotta trouble that I’m glad to do without, from now on. I will forever be more appreciative of the options to:

1. Night-time-date!

The fact that I live in a hick town in the middle of flippin’ nowhere means that the chances of me finding a person to love in the same region are pretty much slim to none. That isn’t helped by the fact that here in the Netherlands the ENTIRE country holds pretty much the same amount of people as the bigger cities in (for instance) the US do. It’s tiny. And that means that driving an hour+ to potential suitors isn’t even slightly uncommon. (Maybe that feels spoiled to Americans who don’t mind driving three hours to get a burger, but yaknow, round these parts anything that takes more than 20 minutes is considered inconvenient)

But with the curfew gone I’m back in the world where you can have dates that don’t have to start BEFORE 20:00 just so you actually get to spend more than 5 minutes together before one party has to inevitably leave to make curfew.

2. No obligatory cooking!

There’s nothing that ticks me off more than having to plan dates during the day (which, in my case, pretty much only leaves the weekends for dating. And I friggin need my weekends to recharge my not-kill-a-colleague-meters). Mostly because I feel like dating in itself is just a nighttime activity (I never understood people who grab lunch or do coffee) but also because thet call it date-NIGHT for a reason. So with the curfew gone…life is better.

No more worrying about meeting up with someone at 16:00 in the afternoon which inevitably also kinda sorta means cooking (NOOOOOOO, straight back to the cooking disaster topic) for them.
Back to having the potential of Netflix and (actual) Chilling when the mood strikes. And weekends to actually weekend in. Makes dating a whole lot less of a chore, to tell you the least!

2. Not-sleep-over!

An additional factor in the whole curfew thing is that on those occasions where you DID decide to night-time date – you’d pretty much be enrolling yourself in a sort of weird dating experiment (much like the dating shows we have on tv here – where couples meet and have to live together for four days as a part of the show).

Because if your date started a bit late – you’d get to a point of having to decide whether you like (and trust) a person enough to invite them to sleep over, instead of kicking them out after an hour (and all the accompanying awkwardness). I mean, I can’t even decide whether I like my mattress after having had it for three years. How am I supposed to make a similar judgment about the man I’ll be on top of for hopefully a lot longer in a LOT less time? Impossibru!

AND – I dunno about you, but I’m pretty anal about sleeping with people overall (the actual sleeping thing, I mean) so deciding whether I’d be comfortable with that in a mere hour? Not a thing.
And when you pretty much literally CAN’T ethically kick someone out AFTER curfew – that just adds a whole nother lever of consideration to planning dates. The how-to-handle-sleepovers conundrum? Glad it’s gone!

Plus, do you know how HORRIBLE it is for an overthinker like myself to even deal with that level of thinking?
‘Does he just want to stay over because he’s literally legally not allowed to go home?’
‘Is he inviting me to stay because he HAS to or, because he wants to?’

The whole ‘having to take politeness into consideration’ part of the whole curfew? Murder on the brain! At least, now, when someone makes a beeline for a bed, I know it’s because they’re actually interested in that for more reasons than avoiding a fine. Immensely better than having to silence the insecure voices on the other options.

So yes. As someone who’d so far had few complaints about the corona-impositions as the hermit-introvert who rejoiced in the working from home, I am now back on board the ‘let’s endure the lockdown measures without complaints’-club. Everything suddenly seems so much more doable now that I at least don’t have to crack my brain over added dating-codes.

But you know what?
Even WITH all the added measurements, difficulty levels and complaints you’ve been reading up on: I’m actually very ecstatic to be dating again AND highly enthusiastic about current potential. So all-round YAY-ness. Yay.