You should stop checking your partner's location (and other dating advice from a gen z).

Related: Immediate gratification is killing modern romance.

I’m 23 years old which means I have grown up in an age where immediate gratification is king and people have access to each other at any given moment. At times I have longed for the “old days,” where you see your crush at school and maybe talk on the phone sometimes, as opposed to being notified about the fact that said crush is hanging out with girls who aren’t you and liking photos of Instagram models who look nothing like you.

I still detest how commonplace it’s become to know someone’s whereabouts at all times. I know people who constantly check their partner’s location, and wonder aloud what they’re doing there. “I don’t recognize this location, he’s probably cheating on me with another girl.” Maybe, or maybe he’s running errands with his mom.

I’ve heard of cases of people needing to send pictures of their whereabouts to their partner as “proof” that they are where they say they are and that they are with who they say they’re with.

This is not normal. But for a lot of gen z, it is the “norm.”

I think if you have this level of insecurity in your relationship, which I understand can come from past relationship trauma, you should not be in a relationship until you work on those insecurities. Continuing to date with this level of anxiety is only feeding the fear and traumatizing your central nervous system.

And I get it, I really do. I have struggled with relationship anxiety for years. I have infused meaning into every text and change of tone, wondering if the lack of punctuation or saying I love you one time less than usual means I’ve done something wrong and am about to get dumped. I have religiously checked if someone has opened my Snapchat, and then checked the last time they were active on the app, feeling crushed if I found out they’d been online and didn’t respond to me. I’ve scrolled through the profiles of girls a boy I’m seeing follows on Instagram, wondering which ones were also on his roster and whether he ranked them above or below me.

Part of this is because I was young and insecure, but most of it is because I had access to information that I was better off not knowing.

Recently I asked my boyfriend to stop sharing his location with me for the same reason I deleted most of my social media accounts: I don’t need to know, and having access to that information could make me start to care about it.

I don’t want to care about it.

We’d been on a trip the week before and had turned on location sharing in case I got lost on one of my runs and didn’t know how to get back to where we were staying. When I went to share it with him, I saw requests for location sharing from my sisters, friends, family members over the years – I didn’t even know those requests were there because I’d never opened the app before. Granted, I have a very grandma-esque approach to the phone these days, but I don’t need people knowing where I am and frankly, I don’t really want to know where other people are.

I absolutely understand some uses of the feature, for example if your friend is going to a new romantic interest’s house for the first time, or you’re a parent who wants to know where your child is. I also get that for some people it eases worries about cheating but imo, if you’re in a healthy, trusting relationship you don’t need this and if someone wants to cheat they’ll find a way to.

So we turned location sharing off. I trust my boyfriend to be where he says he is, and I also want us each to have enough independence within the relationship to have lives outside of each other without needing to divulge every detail. This is not because those details are secret or dirty, but because if I know everything my boyfriend does, thinks, and says because it is all documented on the phone and vice versa, what is there to talk about when we’re together? What is there to learn about each other?

Besides, privacy is important, and a healthy relationship allows for that without the fear that nefarious things are happening beyond that wall of privacy. I don’t need to go through my boyfriend’s phone, and he doesn’t need to go through mine. Not because anyone’s hiding anything, and if either of us paid attention to it we could easily deduce each other’s passcodes just from the amount of times we’ve seen each other open our phones, but because we know that people are allowed to have spaces that are entirely their own, even in a relationship.

I think the expectation of constant access to each other and everything about each other only stokes paranoia and creates insecurities where there may have otherwise been none.

I’m in my early 20s, and this feels like the first time in my life that I’ve been in a relationship with someone and been this relaxed about it. I’ve had anxieties here and there, sure, but I am in a spot where I know myself, I know my weaknesses, and I know the areas I need to work on, but I really have come so far in how I approach dating and crushes and relationships. I don’t have the patience or time for anything that doesn’t feel real and genuine in some way, and I won’t put up with it if it doesn’t. Simple as that.

These are the lessons and rules I have for myself that have revolutionized how I show up in all of my relationships:

1. It is not normal to have access to someone 24/7, or for them to have access to you 24/7. The internet has conditioned us to feel like if someone is online or has their phone with them, they should be available. This expectation will only set you up for disappointment or feeling ignored or unwanted, and when others expect it of you you will only feel depleted and wired.

   1. There is such a thing as too much access. Humans weren’t designed to know what those around us are doing, thinking, saying all the time but the internet and smart phones especially have wired us to think that this level of knowledge about and proximity to people is the norm. Get rid of that notion.

   2. People need space. You need space too. It’s normal and healthy to not respond to text for a few hours after receiving it, and constantly waiting around for a response from someone else keeps you from engaging in your life outside of that person. Ultimately, if you want a healthy relationship with this person, you need to also be living a life outside of them. Most of the time if someone is ignoring you, they’re not ignoring you. They have lives outside of their phone and outside of you and you should see that as a good, healthy thing. I want those I love to have time off their phone. I want them to respond when they feel ready to, because I know that we all communicate differently and at different speeds and the expectation for someone to be available constantly only hurts you and the other person.

2. You don’t know what someone else is thinking and if you think you do, you’re probably projecting what you think (about yourself, or some facet of the relationship). Convincing yourself that you know what’s going on in someone else’s head will only harm you and the relationship.

   1. It’s so easy to get in your head and think “I am feeling disconnected, this person must be too,” or “I feel like I look ugly today, this person is probably thinking the same and they don’t want to be with me anymore” – No. You don’t know any of that. And to move into action based on data that is unconfirmed and biased is a mistake.

   2. Don’t push someone away or pull yourself away based on an assumption about how they’re feeling.

3. Communicate at every stage. I will never have a crush on someone and not make it known again. We waste so much time pining, wondering how someone else feels and if they like us, and can easily become obsessive about a crush. It’s natural, it’s human, and crushes are fun. I’m not discounting that.

   1. But don’t torture yourself over wondering whether or not someone likes you, and trying to decipher every text, word, and action (or lack thereof) will do exactly that. The potential sting of rejection is worth it in the long run if it comes at the expense of punishing yourself for a longer period of time over not knowing.

   2. I created a rule for myself that if I have a crush on someone, I have to tell them. After living that way for a few years, I took a step further and said that if I am out somewhere and find someone attractive, I have to say something. (Obviously I don’t do this if I am in a relationship.)

   3. Related: if you’re in the beginning stages with someone new, make it clear what you want. If you want an exclusive relationship, say that. Compromising your needs as a means of conforming to what somebody else wants — say, a noncommittal hookup — will only hurt you.

4. With that in mind, know that the more you put yourself out there, the more you will get rejected. I am very, very sensitive to rejection. It’s gotten easier the more it happens, but if you want to get comfortable with dating and showing up as yourself, you’re also going to come face to face with the fact that some people are not going to like that self. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.

   1. Remember that the best and most genuine connections you will build in life will come from being your authentic self and not having to alter or diminish your personality in any way. Along the way, you’re also going to get your ass handed to you from time to time by the fact that some people just won’t like you.

   2. The more you put yourself out there whether in dating or friendships, the more you realize that you also don’t like some people, and you also realize that sometimes it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with that person, you just don’t click. It’s so easy to take rejection personally, because it is personal to some degree. But just because it’s personal doesn’t mean it’s important.

      1. The same goes for looks! Think about all the celebrities that are considered some of the most attractive people in the world but just aren’t your type. Someone can have the perfect face, perfect body, charming personality and still, for you, they’re not it. Think about it like that when someone doesn’t like you. Sometimes people just have preferences, and the fact that you don’t match those is nobody’s fault and not something anyone needs to feel bad about.

5. You have to let things be what they are. You can daydream, sure, but don’t future-trip, because you really just have no idea what is going to happen. This is another one I struggle with even still, specifically fearing that someone is going to break up with me. But here’s the truth: they might. And even though that would hurt a lot, and has hurt a lot in the past, I’d still make it out alive.

   1. What’s supposed to happen will happen, and any relationship or love that is forced is not meant to happen. Relationships take work and love is a choice we have to continue to make each day when we are committed to somebody, but they shouldn’t be mostly work, and that choice shouldn’t be mostly a difficult one.

      1. There’s a difference between things taking work, and things being work.

6. Sometimes you’re going to mess up. You might catch yourself waiting by the phone for them to call or text. You might catch yourself dimming parts of your personality out of fear that they might be “too much.” You might catch yourself caring more what the other person thinks about you than what you think about them. This is normal too; we’re human and dating is fun and exciting and with that excitement can come anxiety and fear. We really want this to work out!

   1. That said, when a crush is taking over your whole life, or at least more of it than you’d like it to, it might be time to take a step back. Put the phone on silent for a few hours while you do some activities that bring you joy and purpose. Challenge yourself to show up authentically and remind yourself that if someone doesn’t like or can’t handle your authentic self, they’re not the one for you (and that doesn’t make them a villain either). Check in with yourself on how you’re feeling, and what you think about this person and push yourself to focus more on that than whether you’re acting “likeable.”

7. Finally, remember that you are worthy of love and care whether you are in a romantic relationship or not. It’s easy to put romantic love on a pedestal and forget about the fact that there is love all around us. It’s in your friend sending you a song they heard and think you’d like, it’s in your mother checking in just to say hi, it’s in your brother asking if you want to go to Target with him, it’s in your cat climbing into bed with you to cuddle in the morning, it’s in you deciding to go to sleep early because you have a big day tomorrow. Romantic love is wonderful, and can add a lot of meaning to our lives. But romance isn’t everything, and if you stake your self-worth and happiness in a romantic relationship not only will you get burned if and when things don’t work out, you’ll also miss out on a lot of the love already present in your life.

These are my rules for dating and even though they can be hard to follow, and even though I still struggle from time to time with relationship anxiety, I think this is the healthiest I have ever approached dating and romantic relationships and I hope these tips can help you too. Thank you for reading and I’ll see you next week.

Xoxo,

Grace

buy me a coffee <3