Stage Writes
The Official Stage Rights Blog
Playwrights Lindy Voeltner and Josh Lanzet embrace the failure of dating.
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and Dating: Adults Embracing Failure wants to bring a little hope to the singles out there—those of us who haven’t found their lobster, penguin, fainting goat, or whatever other animal mates you’re looking to meet.
Online dating (we’re all doing it) means we have the opportunity to find our potential bae from anywhere in the United States, or even the world. That’s right, the world. In my grandparents’ day, the only way to find your love internationally was fighting in WW2. There was also the mail order route, but that was before Amazon Prime free two-day shipping.[1]
Now that we have the literal dating world at our feet, what are singles supposed to do?
Panic!
It’s like the cereal aisle at an American supermarket. There are too many options! Why can’t it be Russia, where they’re like, “You eat oatmeal, that’s it! It’s healthy, filling and makes you live longer than you want to.”[2] Thank heavens we’re not limited to oatmeal, but we are still left to sift through the multitude of options and find “the perfect match” — whether that match is steel cut oats, grits, or cream of wheat.
At DAEF, we put our heads together to find the #1 thing you need to know to stop wasting time and find success. Are you ready? It’s…
Nothing. There is no number one rule, or list of five things that will help you find the one. If we knew what that was, you’d see us selling it right after the infomercial for the Oxy Clean.[3]
Our job is to keep growing, maturing, and becoming someone with whom we would like to spend time. The only person we are guaranteed to spend the rest of our lives with is us, so we had better figure out who that person is and embrace what we like and change what we don’t.
Despite what movies and stories have told us our entire lives, life isn’t just about falling in love. Falling in love is a process just like anything else. There are two options when it comes to relationships: you commit to each other and continue to commit to each other again and again for 30 or more years, or you break up. Daunting, sure, but it’s true.
Yes, it sucks to watch your friends find the one, get married, have kids, and constantly post pictures to Instagram about all three.
But. And it’s a big but.[4]
You are single for a reason. Not because you suck and should change[5], but because no one you’ve met has been worth committing to again and again or they haven’t been willing to commit over and over again to you. That puts them in the “not worth it” pile, because you deserve the committing over and over again person.
So you wait. Grow. Learn. Explore. Take risks. Live the life you thought you’d be living when you were ten and thought Space Cowboy was a real job.[6]
Life is a day at a time, even if one is labeled “Valentine’s Day.”
[1] We’re not Amazon shills, but a deal is a deal!
[2] We have no idea if Russia is actually like this, but we’ve chosen to believe it.
[3] Again, we’re not shills for Oxy Clean, but have you tried that on a stain? It’s amazing!
[4] We like big butts. We cannot and would not lie about something like that.
[5] We’re making a big assumption here, so please don’t be that one person who goes “Ha, I’ll show them! I’m gonna suck!”
[6] We still believe that it is and it’s just being kept under wraps or else everybody would become one.
Dating: Adults Embracing Failure is available to license here!