If you are currently reading this, it means I actually decided to go through with this installation for the month of February.

And in my mind, that’s pretty wild.

For those of you who’ve clicked onto this without having a single clue what the fuck you actually clicked onto, give me a moment or so to explain. Welcome to my latest creative project (that doesn’t involve book publishing at all surprisingly), Almost Love: Dating in the Eyes of Generation Z.

In definition terms:

almost love
[awl-mohst luhv] noun.

Almost Love: Dating in the Eyes of Generation Z is a poetry retrospective featuring previously written, published, and recently curated bodies of work that detail the many emotions I’ve felt while dating as Generation Z. From the weird situationships, to toxic entanglements, to extremely long talking stages, and eternally staying in the “pre-cuff” phase, this carefully curated collection of work dives deep into the connection established and other experiences shared with another individual that had the potential to become love, but would be later deemed as Almost Love.

I chose to embark on this project for the month of February because I was up late thinking one night of all my past experiences navigating dating in this society, the things that I’ve felt, and the lessons that I’ve learned that have put me in the spot I am today.

I realize dating in this generation is and can be an extremely hard thing to do, because we’ve normalized things like casual dating, hookup culture, friends with benefits, ghosting, leading people on, playing games, and various other things when it comes to what you share with another individual.

Not that all of these things are necessarily a bad thing (like hookup culture, etc), but you start to think about whether or not people are open to or even capable of experiencing something genuine, serious, and long-term. Especially when all the people you’ve dealt with so far have not only shown you that they aren’t capable, but they’ve also opened up a whole new realm of fears when it comes to dating for you.

I find myself in a situation now where I’m talking to somebody new after taking some time for myself and some time to heal. We’ve been talking for a few months and it’s obvious we’re into each other and want something serious, but the mystery of it actually becoming something still lingers. And after the last few tries, I don’t know if I have it in me to entertain a talking stage that could last a whole year. Not that I’m scared and not ready for that kind of commitment but speaking from one particular experience, the longer it dragged on the more it hurt when it didn’t work out and it was over. It’s important to not rush things and give each other time to get to know each other, but I guess for me there’s a huge part of me that remains hesitant based off of what happened in the past.

And maybe that’s a lesson in and of itself: to learn how to protect yourself from the pain of it not working out, while not completely closing yourself off to the possibility of it actually working out.

Over the last few years, to reiterate, I’ve experienced some unique connections with people that didn’t go anywhere past the talking/pre-cuff stage. Those are what I like to now call my almost love situations — they had the potential to become something serious but unfortunately fell short due to a number of circumstances. Those situations have inspired the words written in my two books, the truth you took away (2019) and when drifting, she dreams (2020). But in going through the motions of those connections (some I thought were genuine and some extremely toxic), I’d become closed off and the thought of letting someone into my life emotionally became unappealing to me.

With this retrospective, I hope to specifically highlight how daunting dating as Generation Z can be (but this can also extend to Millenials as well), using pieces of poems and prose published in my existing two bodies of work and not published works that detail my own experiences. Throughout the entire month of February, 16 different poems will be thrown up onto Unfiltered, each written at different times in my young, adult life.

I have other ambitions for this project of mine. I’ve thought about starting an Instagram account and opening submissions up for people that want to confess their experiences in dating anonymously, BUT I wanted to start out small.

And this is how I plan to do it.

If you’ve made it this far in this little introductory post, I hope you enjoy every little thing that this retrospective has to offer. If my words resonate with you in any way, don’t hesitate to leave a comment on any poems that spoke to you.

ED out x.

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Listen to: Before You Go // Lewis Capaldi

Listen to The Sound of Unfiltered HERE