POSTMODERN ROMANCE: ‘Everyone is poly,’ no one is serious, and other reasons dating in San Francisco is awful.

I spent about six years actively dating around the Bay Area. In that time I dated, for varying amounts of time, three self-described indie rockers, an amateur hockey player, an elementary school teacher with a drinking problem, a yoga teacher who didn’t drink alcohol (or consume processed sugars and carbohydrates of any kind), an English teacher living in his mom’s in-home daycare, and a skateboarding enthusiast who worked as a manager at a tech company.

These budding relationships ended for various reasons. At least three of the aforementioned men were still in love with their exes. One said he couldn’t handle the pressure of texting me “witty responses,” and thus could not go on seeing me. Most of the rest were “not looking for something serious.”

I attributed these failures not to the region in which I was dating, but to the fraught Millennial dating landscape as a whole. Perhaps I was wrong in thinking this, according to a popular San Francisco Reddit thread, posted just in time for Valentine’s Day.

What a sad state of affairs.