Late night rambling #4

I think whenever I hang out with irl people (excluding friends I initially met online), I come away with some new realization or something because they're so different from the people I'm usually surrounded by, and they're not completely dependent on the internet for their social lives and support network like I am.

I'm just gonna ramble because I don't know what my point is or how to organize any of my thoughts and it's 3 AM.

Surprisingly I ended up having a somewhat'ish deep conversation with someone I never spoke to much before, and we talked a lot about dating/relationships because he started flirt texting with this girl and he was super hilariously clueless and we had to coach him through all of it HAHAHAHA it was quite fun. x]

What I learned was that dating (going on dates) is different from being in a relationship.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but that you can go on dates without being in a relationship with someone is a foreign concept to me.

But what I ultimately realized though is that despite having ended my second year of university, I'm still stuck in high school mentality. Which really isn't surprising, now that I think about it.

Well, my friend was telling me about how dating is different in high school compared to after you graduate because in high school, you know everybody. And if not, you probably know somebody that knows whoever you don't know. It's a somewhat tightknit network. You see people around school, you have classes with them, you have mutual friends, you hear things about them, you see what cliques they're in. Without getting to know a person, you kind of can assume many things about a person and with this image, you can decide if you could see yourself dating them. There's a lot of stereotyping but that's usually how it goes.
But it's different once you leave high school. You don't meet many people in college. People come and go, and it becomes harder to have mutual friends. Networking is loose and unreliable, and friendships are harder to keep unless you make an effort to keep contact because unlike high school, you're not forced to see each other everyday.

So what my friend said is that now that we're out of high school, we don't know much about people to begin with so there's less of the mentality of "Let's go into a relationship even though we just started talking." So people go on dates to get to know each other, and I guess if they feel compatible, they enter a relationship? And if not, just stay friends or cut it off.

Laying it down, I realized that I never really "graduated" from high school.
After leaving high school, I spent some time wallowing alone (+ being super clingy to Gemini) then eventually found comfort in entering the vocaloid-covering youtube/twitter community, which honestly is a bit like another high school environment. We can't really kid ourselves; some immature shit goes down in there and many of us have grown to be super internet-dependent and socially awkward, as well as delusional towards reality and its problems and demands. But there is the comfort of getting to know many people and having a tightknit network again, and having friends that'll have your back and that you can talk to almost anytime online.

And I've gotten so used to how online friendships and romantic relationships work because they're what I've been surrounded by for the past year and a half. This community is like high school; you don't really need to get to know a person I suppose because you have a general idea of what they're like, and if you start talking and get along and feel attracted to each other, I guess some people just start up an online relationship.
I DON'T KNOW. I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS OR ROMANCE OR SOCIALIZING OR LIFE, OKAY

It just turned 5:03 AM.