my 2025 dating wrapped

what didn’t happen taught me everything

My 2025 dating wrapped is extremely humble. There are no montages. No dramatic arcs. No enemies to lovers pipeline. Just a few blips on the radar and a lot of emotional weather.

The year technically started with a crush. A brief, ill-advised one. My 2024 lover popped out on New Year’s with a girlfriend, like a microscopic villain reveal, and I unconsciously decided it would be poetically fair to pursue something too. Not because I felt anything particularly real. Mostly out of ego and principle.

I was obsessed with him in the empty way you get obsessed when you know nothing about a person. We had nothing in common. He bored me to death and he had the intellectual and emotional range of a teacup. But he was tall, quiet, and had a melting smile. Which historically has been enough to derail entire empires.

That crush fizzled out in about three weeks. More his doing than mine, but fair nonetheless. It collapsed under the weight of its own lack of substance. A cosmetic fixation. A rebound that never even got the dignity of becoming a real disaster.

After that, the real theme of the year set in. Stillness.

I spent the first half of the year with absolutely no action. I was still metabolizing 2024 the way you metabolize bad food. Slowly and with symptoms.
I wasn’t dating, flirting, orbiting or lingering. I was just licking wounds in peace. Romantic hibernation. I don’t even think I wanted love. I wanted my nervous system back.

By mid June, the stillness cracked. There were a few meaningless hook-ups that felt like a personality reset. They gave me hope, joy, entertainment. Not even in a deep way. Just enough adrenaline to remind me that I am, in fact, a girl with a pulse. For a brief cinematic moment, I thought maybe the drought was over.

Then the bubble burst. Obviously.

That situation did not just disappoint me, it inspired an entire essay. Which is how I now measure emotional damage. If it becomes content, it truly got me.

After that came an older guy. A couple of dates. Easy conversation. Calm energy. No chaos. No confusion. No emotional gymnastics. He even brought me around his family, which in another life would’ve sent me into a bridal pinterest spiral. I think he’s absolutely great. I just never had the Cinderella moment. Nothing knocked the air out of my lungs. No cinematic soundtrack in the background. Just steadiness.

We’re still talking. We even went out two weeks ago. It’s ongoing in that quiet, low-stakes way that feels adult and slightly anti-climactic. Not the kind of story you tell screaming into your group chat. More the kind you mention casually, with a shrug and a well-adjusted nervous system.

I also had a late-summer fling that I absolutely adored. The kind you catch feelings for faster than you catch the bus. It fizzled out due to my worst personal brand traits: impatience, irritability, and the spiritual condition of being easily annoyed when things don’t unfold on my timeline. My fault, mostly. A tragedy in a very compact format. But in my defense, the timing was all wrong. The universe let me catch a glimpse of something good and then immediately started throwing curveballs in my direction that it knew I didn’t have the mental capacity or emotional maturity to work through.

Then there was the on-and-off relationship I’ve been dragging since 2020. The season finale finally aired this year. I stepped out of it. Hopefully for real. I reserve the right to update you in 2026 if he makes a surprise comeback like a cancelled TV character no one asked to be revived.

There was also the guy who had a girlfriend. I will not be unpacking that in detail because even God himself is annoyed with this storyline and because people in my demographic seem to have caught the wrong whiff of the situation and now I’m apparently being trash talked at funerals. The short version is: one date, nothing happened, I cut him off some time later. Roll credits.

When I lay it all out like this, it sounds busier than it felt. But the truth is, I didn’t really put myself out there this year. Not in the hungry way. Not in the anxious way. Not in the “maybe this will fix me” way.

And that’s the actual wrapped. Because a relationship just didn’t feel cost effective anymore.

2023 and 2024 were major learning years. Loud years. Messy years. Years where life dragged me by the ankles through every pattern I refused to look at. 2025 was quieter on purpose. This was the year to put the knowledge into practice. To stop reenacting the curriculum. To finally apply the lesson instead of auditioning for a remix.

This was not a year of romantic spectacle. It was a year of boundaries doing their job. Of attraction not automatically overriding self-respect. Of boredom being preferable to disrespect. Of peace beating potential in a landslide election.

My dating wrapped doesn’t say that no one wanted me. It says I stopped wanting things that cost me clarity.