"I made us reservations" is music to my recovering people-pleaser ears
+ how I fill out my hinge profile to attract people who do this
I want to start by saying this is really new for me…
Being treated well by romantic interests that take initiative and plan ahead and do cute shit.
It’s literally the bare minimum, but baby, the bar has been in HELL for most of my life. Like you would think I literally climbed into the depths of hell to find some of these guys.
And granted, I did have one really good boyfriend in college so I don’t want to discount how great he was, but my self-esteem was also on the floor and the guys I chose to be with before and after him were my mirror.
Frankly, it makes me so sad thinking about how many guys I begged to do the bare minimum.
But thankfully that’s changed. Over the past two years, after opening myself up to dating again, I slowly started raising my standards (because the nervous system couldn’t handle me advocating so fiercely for my needs right out the gate, we had to work up to that).
I started first by saying NO to people who didn’t meet my bare minimum standards, but I was still scared to actually call in the kind of treatment I secretly wanted by, for example, spelling it out on my hinge (we’ll get to that).
And don’t get me wrong, every now and then I’d backslide right into a fuckboy with an avoidant attachment style who activated my wounded need to be validated (we’ll also get to THAT in upcoming paid stories)…
But for the most part, I’ve been doing pretty well.
I started meeting much nicer guys who were excited to treat me well. And it felt SO FUCKING GOOD.
The first few times this happened, I was on cloud 9. I would run around to my friends like “omg you’ll never believe how GREAT he was, like, he did this tiny, thoughtful thing that nobody has ever done for me before!!!!”
Which my friends would be very supportive of but also slightly concerned about because again… bar, meet floor.
ANYWAY
Over time, I started practicing this little thing called “asking for what I need” and “being honest with my feelings even if I was terrified of how they would react”. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of these concepts, but I can’t recommend them enough.
And slowly, over time, these nice guys continued to show me it was safe to do this.
But I still felt the need to be palatable. If someone didn’t go out of their way to do sweet things for me, I wasn’t necessarily going to ASK for it, you know.
Especially not online. And especially especially not on Hinge (which is weird because it’s not like I’ll ever meet most of these people, and yet the idea of setting expectations made me so nervous).
That is… until I saw a TikTok of a girl saying she writes in her Hinge profile the following quotes…
The prompt will be something like “what do you look for” and she literally wrote…
“Dinner is at 8”
“I made reservations for us”
In quotations like that, fully just telling guys what she wants to hear. And according to her, it had been working out well. Guys were planning nice dinners, and it scared off anyone who wasn’t willing to do the work.
But LORD did that scare me. I was high in my bed staring at the screenshot of her quotes, debating if I had the guts to actually post.
(Also, I would show you the original video but this was months ago and I can’t find it, unfortunately).
I think I ended up copying her exact response and leaving it up for a max of 24 hours just to feel into it, but it still didn’t feel right for me.
What I figured out pretty quickly is once I got over the fear of stating what I want, I could tweak the language to make it sound more like me.
So I did just that!
Here’s what I have in my profile now:
Obviously, had to show off the hot picture I have right below it.
Let me know in the comments if you want to see my whole Hinge profile and I’ll do a walk-through.
But this just feels more like me, and the beautiful thing that happens when you put out into the universe what you actually want is that life starts to mirror it back to you.
I’m headed to Texas next week and I’m spending the weekend with a boy I’ve known for a few years and won’t be talking much about on here because he’s very sweet and I want to keep it private.
But I facetimed him today to find out the plan, and all he said was “I made reservations for us Friday and Saturday night, not gonna tell you where but you’ll like it”
AHHH
When I tell you that made my fuckin day and inspired this post.
And keep in mind, I know him from real life so he’s never even seen my Hinge. He just enjoys treating me right.
And no matter how many times this happens or how high I raise my standards, I don’t think I’ll ever take things like this for granted. Or at least I hope not. Because I love feeling this special and I fuckin deserve it.
Moral of the story: make it clear what you want, and feel free to soften up the language as much as you need to in order to feel comfortable doing so.
And then actually start saying no when people aren’t meeting those standards. You gotta leave space for the good ones to start showing up.
Love you