How FOMO Can Destroy Your Dating Life

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Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably come across the abbreviation FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). It's the feeling you get when you're at work and come across a picture of your friends enjoying their exotic vacations or a picture of your batchmate who is getting married. FOMO isn't dangerous until it starts affecting your life legitimately and according to experts it's creeping its way into relationships (insert screaming).

Have you ever gone shopping and found an extremely attractive piece of clothing but passed on buying it because you thought you could probably find something better?

Coming to relationships, before you start dating someone, does something like 'what if I meet someone better than him' cross your mind? If yes, you are a victim of #fomo. FOMO is one of the million social issues we face today, but often forget that we are the ones who created it.

We conceptualized casually sleeping around bouncing from one partner to another and called it a Tinder lifestyle. There's nothing wrong with it, literally. All there is to say is that this pervasive apprehension has been started by us, we the people.

FOMO is a lie we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves we deserve better than this, and the universe has to wave its magic wand and make things work in our favour. Although, when things don't work out, we think the world is conspiring against us. No, it's not the world, it's us.

Comparison. It's our guilty pleasure. We compare jobs, clothes, food, believes, and now, people. We suddenly become extremely generous with our self-confidence, build a skyscraper of self-worth, that leads us all the way to dissatisfaction. We want better.

We want perfect. This is another lie we tell ourselves. Our subconscious builds an imaginary picture of 'perfection' and we start our nomadic search, aimlessly looking to find its mirror image in the real world.

When searching for our better half, we do it with such pressure that we depend on that one person to possess all those qualities we once depended on the entire society for. We want them to be our best friend, our guardian angel, a lover and to be blessed with this unrealistically huge list of qualities in order for them to become our significant other.

God forbid we realize they don't have these or have missed out on even one of these qualities (because heaven knows how important each of them is) we want to move to the next best option (person). We find a flaw in the product and not the process.

Think about this - what if you actually miss out because of FOMO? In simpler words, what if you have your soul mate right in front of you, on their knees, asking you out, but you reject them because you think the fictional perfectionist is going to come around? We don't mean you should give a chance to anyone and everyone who comes around but someone whom you genuinely like but are willing to give up on just because you think you'd get better.

Once you are in a relationship, commit. Give your relationship a genuine chance to grow. Give your all and don't think about what is in store for you with someone else. Remove all thoughts about how you could have it better with a different person.

No relationship is better, it's just different. Different relationships will make you feel different emotions. It's okay to give up on someone if they don't make you feel good, but don't give up thinking someone else would make you feel better.

Remember, these lies we tell ourselves won't get us anything, certainly not what we want, but it sure can leave us with anxiety, sadness and hate for the universe.