Hyperactive Dating Disorder

HDD. Hyperactive Dating Disorder. Look it up. You'll find it in the textbook of life. (Now read that again as Rod Serling would).

NJG and I were discussing the singles event that we recently attended. He made an interesting observation about a severe disadvantage to the method of dating that is prevalent in the religious community. It's a numbers game and people feel their number must come up ASAP. There is the pressure of time, or biological clock, community and family pressure, as well as frustration that things take so long. To expedite the process and take in a representative sampling, they become serial daters. Many date in parallel as well as in sequence. How they can keep track of multiple partners is beyond me although the idea of multiples is intriguing...

The OCD behavior reinforces itself and an HDD develops. Often by the third date, a decision is made to continue seriously or move on. And so for the most part, it's on to the next victim. An HDD individual experiences only one brief snapshot of a person before bolting to the next snapfish in the sea. There isn't the lengthy time necessary to really explore a prospective's personality, watch how a relationship develops and evolves, or experience the ups and downs of their respective life experiences. Most importantly, Mr. (or Mrs.) HDD has lost the opportunity to look back on this would be, complex interaction and view it as a learning process. He could have then taken the sum of all the knowledge gleaned regarding those intricate facets of life and intergender (species?) relationships and apply those pearls of wisdom to the next relationship and so forth. Thus after successive relationships, emotional maturity, better insight into his own needs as well as his partners, he could have developed a greater sense of how to better succeed in the next set of circumstances. But the HDD sufferer does not allow for such in-depth growth. Instead, his illness restricts and forces him to remain singularly focused on his own reality and himself rather than getting close to another human being.

HDD. An experience of a frenzied mind searching from body to body, making only a brief stop here in the ...... Dating Zone!
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