We’ve all been there. You’ve been seeing someone, and it feels like its going great. Then, they stop calling. Their interest has gone from completely involved to non-existent, and once you get the guts to talk about it with them, their interest has turned into avoidance.

Bianca Strosnider

This is what I like to call the “two-month mark,” and it is a common and dreaded event. After a couple months of exclusively seeing someone, both members of the party begin to consider adding a label and deeming themselves as “in a relationship.”

Unfortunately, this scenario has an alternative ending — an ending that seems to happen much more often. Someone begins to panic at the thought of a commitment, and before you know it, you feel as if you have been jilted in the face of a promising relationship. As someone who has been in both places, I would recommend two things.

First, if you are a victim of the two-month mark, don’t take it too personally. There are a thousand reasons as to why people aren’t ready to begin a relationship, and chances are, not many of them have to do with you. Letting go of the notion that a relationship didn’t happen because of you is a crucial step to moving on.

Second, as a whole, we need to reintroduce the concept of casual dating to our generation. No, I don’t mean everyone should go find a hook-up buddy, because I know enough people who fall into that disastrous situation. However, it wouldn’t hurt for people to date someone without the intention of being with them for an extended period of time.

People have many reasons for not wanting to date exclusively, such as a busy schedule, commitments to keep up with and the possibility of moving after college. However, it can be a great experience to date someone and not expect to plan for the future.

Dating someone just to “see how it goes” can be a way to gain knowledge about what you would like in a long-term commitment. Not only can you spend time with someone you care about, but it can be an insightful way to learn about yourself and the kind of person with whom you are compatible. You can discover if your casual relation should advance to something more serious or which personality traits may work better for your expectations for a future relationship.

When someone has let you down and it has hurt you more than you would like to admit, it can be easy to linger on what you did wrong or if there is something you could have done to change the outcome of things. At the end of the day, you deserve someone who wants to be in a relationship with you without a second thought, even if they are not planning on a long-term commitment. The two-month mark is an entirely too common experience for many people, and dispelling the concept of all-or-nothing dating could very possibly diminish the chances of it happening to you for the first time, or again.

— Bianca Strosnider is a junior from Sandy Springs majoring public relations