Dating has taught me what I want and don't want, who I am, and

In the councils of the heart, a clear bell rings: “Dating has taught me what I want and don’t want, who I am, and who I want to be.” Hear how the sentence moves—like a pilgrim’s path—first sorting provisions (want/don’t want), then discovering the traveler (who I am), and at last naming the horizon (who I want to be). It is not the boast of conquest but the journal of apprenticeship. We do not merely meet others when we date; we meet ourselves in the reflective surface of their words, their habits, their silences.

The ancients would have recognized this curriculum. Every encounter is a mirror; every supper is a school. In the glow and friction of companionship, our boundaries become visible: what warms us, what withers us, what we will bless, and what we must refuse. The art of want is gratitude; the art of don’t want is guardianship. Together they draw the map of a life that can stay whole while it opens its gates.

From such maps emerges identity. To discover who I am is to notice our unbribable truths—the pace at which we need conversation, the reverence we give to promises, the way our spirit leans toward home or horizon. And, with gentleness, dating also reveals our tender faults: where we interrupt, where we shrink, where we confuse attention for love. If we are brave, we thank our teachers—even those who stayed briefly—for showing us where to mend and where to magnify.

Consider a historical lantern. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, two meteors of color, collided and circled through devotion and disquiet. In loving a counterpart so vast, Frida came to name her own magnitude. Out of storm and loyalty she learned both who she was—a singular artist with a vocabulary of pain and defiance—and who she wanted to be—someone who could turn private suffering into public courage. Their union was not tidy; it was instructive. The lesson is not to imitate their turmoil, but to see how love’s furnace, rightly tended, can refine rather than consume.

We should also honor a humbler tale. A teacher—call her Mira—dated for years as if auditioning for someone else’s script. One evening she wrote two lists: what left her radiant (want), what left her smaller (don’t want). She brought the lists to the next first date not as demands but as discernment. When the man’s kindness matched her creed and his actions rhymed with his sentences, she recognized a kind of quiet she had longed for but never named. She later said, “I did not find myself in him; I found space to be myself with him.” That is the sacred fruit of wise choosing.

Thus the quote’s wisdom shines: Dating is not a scavenger hunt for perfection; it is a pilgrimage of formation. The task is not to secure a trophy but to grow a truthful self—so that when covenant arrives, you bring a whole person to the table. In this light, even partings are not waste; they are tuition paid in the coin of experience, yielding clarity for the journey ahead.

Carry these practices like travel charms. (1) After each encounter, write one line for want and one for don’t want—facts, not fantasies. (2) Ask one brave question early—about values, not preferences—so you can hear who they are and note who you are in reply. (3) Watch verbs, not adjectives: promises are clouds; patterns are rain. (4) Keep a boundary you can articulate in a single sentence; defending it teaches who you want to be. (5) When a bond ends, bless the lesson, then release the rehearsal so the real play can begin. In these small, steady obediences, the path of dating becomes a school of dignity—and you will walk it with a clearer heart, a kinder spine, and a destiny chosen rather than drifted into.