If we’re honest with ourselves, we know if a relationship isn’t working, if it is abusive or hurtful, or if it has run it’s course. We can ask trusted family and friends for their opinion if we’re confused or unsure.

1. High selectivity is normal, especially as we get older

When you enter the post-20’s dating world, your life experience has shaped your preferences. You’ve likely developed clear ideas of what you want in a partner, both in terms of personality and compatibility.

• This means it’s natural to not feel interested in most people you date.
• Selectivity isn’t a problem—it often reflects self-knowledge and maturity.

2. Same-sex dating dynamics can be tricky

• In male same-sex dating, especially in places like Sydney, there can be a stronger focus on physical attraction in initial meetings.
• That can make it harder to find someone you genuinely click with emotionally or mentally, because a lot of initial dating chemistry may feel superficial or performance-based.

3. Emotional vs. physical attraction

• Your emotional and intellectual connection becomes [more] key to your interest.
• You may feel attracted physically to some, but if the emotional or personality resonance isn’t there, you simply won’t want to continue. That’s perfectly normal.

4. Reciprocity matters a lot

• Humans are wired for reciprocal interest: when it’s not returned, our brains often disengage emotionally to protect ourselves from disappointment.
• This can make dating feel discouraging because your standards and their feelings don’t always align.

5. Psychological patterns that could be at play

• High self-awareness: You know what you want and won’t settle.
• Emotional caution: After multiple dates where interest isn’t reciprocated, your mind may naturally limit attachment until someone truly matches your criteria.
• Confirmation bias in dating: You notice quickly when someone isn’t “right,” which is good for avoiding poor matches—but can also make you feel like genuine connections are rare.

6. This is very common for mature adults dating

• Many people in their late 30s–40s experience the same thing.
• Your dating pool is smaller because you’re looking for someone with very specific qualities (age, personality, emotional intelligence, compatibility).

Practical advice for dating in this context

a. Broaden [wisely] your dating strategies

• While selectivity is good, small adjustments in mindset can increase your chances:
  • Look beyond initial “type” indicators and give people a bit more time to reveal personality.
  • Join social groups or interest-based communities (sports clubs, arts, volunteering, LGBTQ+ meetups). Often chemistry develops in shared activity contexts rather than first-date settings.

b. Focus on quality interactions

• Instead of increasing quantity, increase meaningfulness: fewer, more intentional dates with people you have some natural overlap with (values, lifestyle, humor).
• Online apps can be helpful, but try to filter for shared interests or mutual values to save time and emotional energy.

c. Work on internal calibration

• Reflect on what triggers your strong attraction. Are there patterns (personality, energy, humor, confidence)?
• This helps to recognize potential even if it’s not immediately intense, and also helps articulate your preferences clearly to prospective dates.

d. Manage expectations

• It’s normal for the dating ratio (you like → they like) to be low, especially with high selectivity. Patience is key.
• Celebrate the small wins: every connection you explore, even if it doesn’t last, builds social and emotional insight.

e. Emotional self-care

• Rejection is part of the process and rarely personal—it’s more about compatibility.
• Maintain supportive friendships, hobbies, and self-affirmation to avoid over-investing emotionally in every date.

Mindset shift suggestion

Instead of thinking:

“There are very few people I want to see again, and they don’t feel the same way”

Try:

“I’m selective and I know what I want. Meeting the right person may take time, but each date helps me understand myself and my preferences more clearly.”

This subtle mindset shift reduces pressure and anxiety, while keeping your standards intact.

Inattentional Blindness is the failure to notice an unexpected object in a visual display.

Cognitive Psychology is an approach to understanding human cognition by observing behaviour of people performing cognitive tasks. It is concerned with the internal processes involved in making sense of our environment, and deciding what behaviour to be appropriate. These processes include attention, perception, learning, memory, language, problem-solving, reasoning, and thinking.

The most famous experiment that shows evidence for inattentional blindness is the Simons and Chabris (1999) experiment where an audience or viewer watches a group of people pass a ball to one another wearing either black or white, and a woman dressed as a gorilla enters the frame for 9 seconds, then walks off. Results reported that 50% of the observers did not notice the gorilla enter the frame. In all honesty, when I saw the video for the first time at university, I did not see the gorilla enter the frame either.

In reality, we are often aware of changes in our visual environment because we detect motion cues accompanying the change. This information suggests that our ability to detect visual changes is not only due to the detection of movement. An obvious explanation of the gorilla experiment findings is that the visual representations we form in our mind are sparse and incomplete because they depend on our limited attentional focus. Simons and Rensick (2005) point out that there are other explanations, such as: detailed and complete representations may exist initially but may either decay rapidly or be overwritten by a subsequent stimulus. It needs to be said that in the gorilla experiment, the observers are instructed to count how many times the ball passes, so really, our attention is deliberately compromised. The real-life implications of inattentional blindness reveals the role of selective attention in human perception. Inattentional blindness represents a consequence of this critical process that allows us to remain focused on important aspects of our world without distraction from seemingly irrelevant objects and events.

Being present, in the moment (mindfulness) can help aid our attention. Distractions such as using our mobile phones, advertising material, other people, “multi-tasking” and internal emotional states all contribute to our lack of focus and attention. Think of a magician’s ability to manipulate their audiences attention in order to prevent them from seeing how a trick is performed. There are also safety implications, as you would know … if you’ve been paying attention, haha.

Just food for thought, my readers, and friends 🙂

Unhelpful Cognitions

Mental Filter: This thinking style involves a “filtering in” and “filtering out” process – a sort of “tunnel vision”, focusing on only one part of a situation and ignoring the rest. Usually this means looking at the negative parts of a situation and forgetting the positive parts, and the whole picture is coloured by what may be a single negative detail.

Jumping to Conclusions: We jump to conclusions when we assume that we know what someone else is thinking (mind reading) and when we make predictions about what is going to happen in the future (predictive thinking).

Mind reading: Is a habitual thinking pattern characterized by expecting others to know what you’re thinking without having to tell them or expecting to know what others are thinking without them telling you. This is very common, and most people can identify. Oftentimes, when we are telling someone a story about an interaction, we’ve had with someone else, we will make mind reading assumptions without actually having fact or evidence e.g., “They haven’t phoned me in two weeks so they must be angry with me for cancelling on them last week.”

Personalisation: This involves blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong or could go wrong, even when you may only be partly responsible or not responsible at all. You might be taking 100% responsibility for the occurrence of external events. It can also involve blaming someone else for something for which they have no responsibility. This can often occur when setting a boundary with someone and you take responsibility for their guilt or anger.

Catastrophising: Catastrophising occurs when we “blow things out of proportion” and we view the situation as terrible, awful, dreadful, and horrible, even though the reality is that the problem itself may be quite small.

Black & White Thinking: Also known as splitting, dichotomous thinking, and all-or-nothing thinking, involves seeing only one side or the other (the positives or the negatives, for example). You are either wrong or right, good or bad and so on. There are no in-betweens or shades of grey.

Should-ing and Must-ing: Sometimes by saying “I should…” or “I must…” you can put unreasonable demands or pressure on yourself and others. Although these statements are not always unhelpful (e.g., “I should not get drunk and drive home”), they can sometimes create unrealistic expectations.

Should-ing and must-ing can be a psychological distortion because it can “deny reality” e.g., I shouldn’t have had so much to drink last night. This is helpful in the sense that it communicates to us that we have exceeded our boundaries, however, saying “shouldn’t” about a past situation can be futile because it cannot be changed.

Overgeneralisation: When we overgeneralise, we take one instance in the past or present, and impose it on all current or future situations. If we say, “You always…” or “Everyone…”, or “I never…” then we are probably overgeneralising.

Labelling: We label ourselves and others when we make global statements based on behaviour in specific situations. We might use this label even though there are many more examples that are not consistent with that label. Labelling is a cognitive distortion whereby we take one characteristic of a person/group/situation and apply it to the whole person/group/situation. Example: “Because I failed a test, I am a failure” or “Because she is frequently late to work, she is irresponsible”.

Emotional Reasoning: This thinking style involves basing your view of situations or yourself on the way you are feeling. For example, the only evidence that something bad is going to happen is that you feel like something bad is going to happen. Emotions and feelings are real however they are not necessarily indicative of objective truth or fact.

Magnification and Minimisation: In this thinking style, you magnify the positive attributes of other people and minimise your own positive attributes. Also known as the binocular effect on thinking. Often it means that you enlarge (magnify) the positive attributes of other people and shrink (minimise) your own attributes, just like looking at the world through either end of the same pair of binoculars.

(CCI, 2008)