It's Dating Season!

A few years ago, facetiously, I came up with the concept of Dating Season for a young, single male. The official start of Dating Season is today, February 15th, and it concludes on December 30th. The rationale behind this is that, as a young single guy, you don't want to have to deal with Valentine's Day. It's not so much that it's sappy, over-hyped and over-commercialized, but going out with a girl on Valentine's Day implies a level of commitment not necessarily desirable for a bachelor doing his best to live the dream. And Dating Season appropriately ends on December 30th because as a young man, you want to be single on New Year's Eve. Aside from a good friend's bachelor party, there is no better night to be going out with your boys, unattached and available. Other major holidays - Christmas, Thanksgiving, Independence Day, etc. - are included in Dating Season. I call this the Mike Greenburg rule. On ESPN Radio's Mike and Mike in the Morning, Greenburg rants annually about being trapped inside with his family for an entire day during Thanksgiving. And he's right - if you have a chance to avoid the monotony of family gatherings on major holidays, you take it!

While I hope many young men in the world do find the idea of Dating Season to be applicable to their lives, I must admit that, for several reasons, it is no longer relevant to mine. One, I'm not that young anymore. Yeah I know 29 is hardly old, but my perspective is different now than it was 2 or 3 years ago. Two, I've encountered and battled health problems in the last 2 years that have drastically altered how I live my life. I've always been someone who appreciate experiences with others above all else, but I've come to appreciate those experiences more in laid-back, relaxed settings than the wild and crazy scene. And three, sometime in the last 2 or 3 years I came to appreciate that life is a richer experience when it can be shared with someone or someones else, and I find that to be where my focus lies these days. Just as there comes a time in every young man's life (well almost every) when he realizes he's not going to be a big league ballplayer, I guess there comes a time in every grown man's life when he realizes he'd rather be Jon Favreau than Vince Vaughn at the end of Swingers.