It’s after work on a Friday and you’re invited to karaoke night with all your coworkers.
You agree to go because you know that newly employed cutie you’ve been eyeing will be there and you’re hoping to end the night with them wrapped in your arms. As your night progresses, you admit your longing for your love interest but you’re met with questions such as, “You like me as a friend, right? Because I’d really like to be your friend.”
You lie.
You say you’d like to remain friends, your word is taken literally, and now you have a confusing friends-with-benefits dynamic between you that you never intended to form. Next thing you know, your beloved marries someone else.
While I did just summarize the plot of (500) Days of Summer, the film itself highlights an issue which many singles face today: failed relationships due to unclear or opposing intentions. When two people meet and develop a relationship, it almost doesn’t even matter if they share the same values and interests, or even if they find each other attractive, so long as they don’t share the same outcome for the relationship. You might swipe right on someone who seems to meet your criteria for a long-term relationship but, even if you match, you risk wasting your time on someone who only wants you for a hook-up or a casual fling. So how do we solve this problem? State your intentions clearly and effectively at the very beginning.
If we look at the statistics, according to a study Pew Research did on dating app use in the past 5 years, about 57% of women say they received at least one sexually explicit message or image they didn’t ask for. On the other hand, 61% of men claimed they did not receive enough messages from people they were actually interested in.
What if you could avoid this kind of disappointment while using dating apps by simply sharing your intentions before even matching? Perhaps, then, you wouldn’t receive unwanted explicit messages and/or you would actually get a response from those matches who value relationships in the same way you do.
“…dating today requires a level of intention that I see a lot of Millennials lacking,” states dating coach Damona Hoffman in her dates and mates podcast.
However, Marriage and family therapist, Nicole Richardson, told Elite Daily, “Setting an intention for dating implies that you plan to be mindful about dating in a way that perhaps you have not in the past… Setting a dating intention can simply be a plan to listen to your heart more as you meet new people.” When you know each other’s intentions, you are being honest with not only your recipient, but also with yourself.
Your love for each other becomes comfortable in that you know where you intend to take this journey together while also sharing the same interests and mutual attraction.
While this article from Elite Daily emphasizes being clear on how you conduct yourself on the first date, a new face on the dating market, Curius, is here to help you match with those who share your intentions. It’s especially clear today that people of all genders are not always looking to get married or even to maintain a steady relationship, and you can find all different kinds of people with varying intentions on left/right swiping apps like Tinder and Bumble. This leads to a lot of time wasted and hearts broken.
Curius, however, is a novel dating app that allows you to swipe a potential match into six different categories which represent different intentions: Life-time commitment, serious dating, casual dating, hook-up, friendship, and chat. You can set your preferences for matches, too, so if you only want to match with those looking to make friends or enter a long-term romance, all you have to do is adjust your settings and you can start meeting people with your same intentions.
It’s all in your hands–pun intended!
Curius is set to launch for IOS devices on June 17th with the Android version development still in progress. The best part is that it’s free. Don’t be a Tom or a Summer–start sharing what you really want so you can get what you really want.