I like the idea of dating, but I'm not dating anyone exclusively

In the clear, careful words of Cory Monteith—“I like the idea of dating, but I’m not dating anyone exclusively, particularly right now. It’s hard to be in a relationship unless you’re ready to go public with it. So it’s a lot easier for me to not be in a relationship. I really don’t want that part of my life to be tabloid fodder.”—we hear a young man setting a gate around his heart. He does not scorn love; he shelters it. The sentence is a soft refusal wrapped around a fierce conviction: intimacy withers when it must bloom beneath floodlights. The soul needs shade to take root, and fame burns too hot for tender beginnings.

The ancients would have nodded at this restraint. They taught that sacred things require veils: vows spoken behind doors, covenants guarded by thresholds. To bind oneself in a relationship was never meant to be a spectacle; it was a craft of two apprentices learning patience. Monteith names the paradox of our age: to love someone exclusively, one must often love them publicly; and yet the ritual unveiling demanded by crowds can strip meaning from the act. What should be offered becomes displayed. What should mature in silence is thrust into noise.

Mark how he honors desire without surrendering to it—“I like the idea of dating,” he admits—yet refuses the machinery that turns affection into content—“I don’t want it to be tabloid fodder.” This is not timidity but stewardship. He recognizes that to be ready for love is not only to feel deeply; it is to bear wisely. If the only doorway into union is a door that opens onto everyone, then the house will never feel like home. Thus the sober choice: it is easier, for now, not be in a relationship, than to offer a fragile bond to the market of curiosity.

History gives us a lamp for this path. Greta Garbo, pursued by lenses, famously kept her private heart veiled—“I want to be alone,” she said—not as a refusal of friendship, but as a defense of self. She understood that an overexposed seed never germinates. The opposite tale warns us: romances paraded too soon become serialized for strangers, and the lovers end up performing a part they cannot keep. Where the scrolls sell, the spirit starves. Monteith’s guardrails are born from that knowledge: to protect the living thing, he keeps it close until it can bear the weather.

There is also an older parable from Rome: betrothals announced with wreaths and witnesses only when families had weighed the season, the dowry, the temper of the pair. The curtain lifted after deliberation, not for spectacle. Our age reverses it; we raise the curtain first and deliberate later. Monteith turns the curtain back to its rightful use. He would rather be honest about being not ready than to let the chorus dictate the timing. Better an untroubled single path than a stormed bridge to nowhere.

From his confession a lesson rises like a steady flame: privacy is not secrecy; it is the climate where truth can grow. Do not mistake the hunger to go public for the readiness to love. Readiness is measured by quiet—by the capacity to listen, to apologize, to build rituals no camera can monetize. If the only way to prove your bond is to parade it, then you have built it for the parade, not for the winter.

Let the counsel be practical. (1) Before seeking a label, test for shelter: can we keep each other safe from noise? (2) Set a circle of first witnesses—two friends, not two million—so feedback is care, not commerce. (3) Delay announcements until patterns—not moments—prove the bond. (4) Learn to say, with gentle conviction, “Right now, I’m not ready to go public,” and let that boundary guard both of you. (5) Treat every date as a sanctuary: phones down, stories up, no screenshots—only memory.

At last, carry Monteith’s wisdom like a seal on your sleeve: love is a fire that prefers a hearth to a bonfire. Keep the kindling dry; choose the room before the crowd; honor the time it takes to become exclusively faithful in deed, not merely in display. Then, if you ever step into the public square together, you will do so not to create a romance, but to reveal one already tempered—one that no tabloid can cheapen, because it was never built for them.