You'll Never Be "The One" Until He Decides He's Done Looking.

Eda Dolunay
4 hours ago
5 min read

There's a deeply unromantic theory floating around modern dating culture: men don't marry the woman they love the most. They marry the woman who happens to be sitting in the passenger seat the moment their internal taxi light switches on. The horrifying part isn't that the theory exists. It's how many men openly operate by it.

The last time I was single, I was twenty-one. In the short two-to-three-year gap that followed, the dating landscape evolved faster than a Zara seasonal drop. Suddenly, everyone was speaking in a strange new dialect of situationships, roster rotations, soft launches, and emotionally unavailable men who somehow still had enough emotional energy to discuss "long-term alignment" over martinis.

At first, I assumed it was simply the chaos of early adulthood. A generation overwhelmed by too many options, too little certainty, and a collective fear of sincerity. But as I drifted further into my mid-twenties, I realised something much stranger was happening beneath the surface. Modern dating hadn't become less calculated. It had become aggressively strategic. Fresh out of a long-term relationship, my post-breakup goals were embarrassingly simple. I wanted to flirt. I wanted to wear impractical outfits to dimly lit bars. I wanted to focus on my career, romanticise my city, and maybe kiss a few beautiful strangers without accidentally entering a blood oath disguised as a talking stage.

What I did not expect was to find myself repeatedly trapped in bizarre TED Talks hosted by men with commitment spreadsheets.

Every date seemed to follow the exact same structure. Somewhere between the second drink and the dessert menu, the man across from me would suddenly lower his voice, look at me with alarming seriousness, and explain that he "respected me too much" to date me casually. Apparently, I was "wife material." The kind of beautiful you marry, not the kind you sleep with impulsively. They would say this as though they were presenting me with a humanitarian award.

And then came the real plot twist. Despite having no intention of actually committing to me now, these men fully expected me to remain quietly orbiting in the background of their lives until they eventually decided they were "ready." Not emotionally ready, necessarily. Financially ready. Professionally ready. Chronologically ready. Ready in the way startups become ready for acquisition.

Usually, the dating ecosystem contains three recognisable male archetypes: the man genuinely seeking love, the man honest enough to admit he isn't ready, and the confused amateur improvising his way through emotional adulthood. But somewhere along the line, a fourth category emerged: The strategic placeholder.

These are men who desperately want marriage someday but view timing as more important than connection. So when they encounter a woman they perceive as ideal, they don't pursue her passionately. They place her into emotional storage. Under the guise of "respect," they attempt to preserve access to her for later. The language they use is almost identical every time. They speak about relationships the way junior investment bankers discuss market timing. They are "building." They are "positioning themselves." They are "thinking long term." Meanwhile, the woman sitting across from them slowly realises she isn't being desired in the present moment. She is being managed as a future asset.

The supreme irony of all this? I often didn't even want these men seriously. While they were mentally placing me into some imaginary five-year marital projection, I was still deciding whether I even wanted a second date. There was something almost comical about sitting across from a man mapping out our hypothetical future children while I was privately thinking: I actually just came for a spicy margarita and a distraction.

Yet somehow, they viewed this entire arrangement as deeply flattering to women.

When I asked one man whether he had ever considered that these women might not want to patiently wait around for him, he looked genuinely confused. "Why wouldn't they?" he said. "They know how much I respect them." That was the moment the entire illusion cracked.

Modern dating has produced a very specific type of male delusion: men who believe that withholding commitment temporarily increases their value, while simultaneously assuming women will remain frozen in time until their internal readiness clock activates. But ready for what, exactly? For love? Rarely. More often, it's readiness for stability. Readiness for routine. Readiness triggered by peer pressure, ageing, career milestones, or the sudden realization that everyone else has started posting engagement photos from vineyards in Tuscany.

These are the raw mechanics of the Taxi Cab Theory. A man doesn't necessarily marry the woman he loved most intensely. He marries the woman who happens to be present at the exact moment his internal taxi light turns on. The moment he grows tired of driving around alone. The moment his friends settle down. The moment the fear of permanent loneliness becomes louder than the thrill of endless possibility. And what makes this theory so bleak isn't just its emotional passivity. It's the entitlement.

These men genuinely expect women to remain emotionally parked at the curb of their lives until they're ready to pull over. As though our timelines, desires, and evolving standards are merely supporting characters in the grand narrative of their own self-development. To them, love becomes logistical. Not destiny. Not chaos. Not irrational, magnetic obsession. Just timing. A calendar notification disguised as romance.

The saddest part is how profoundly unromantic this makes modern masculinity feel. So many men move through dating not like lovers, but like project managers overseeing emotional acquisitions. They optimise. They strategise. They preserve options. They categorise women into "fun now" and "wife later," entirely missing the possibility that the woman herself may eventually look at their carefully constructed timeline and decide she'd rather disappear into the city than become another item on it.

Because, contrary to popular belief, women are not sitting around waiting to be selected. At least, not the women these men claim to admire most.

The truly magnetic women—the women they describe as unforgettable, intelligent, and rare—are usually busy building entire inner worlds of their own. They're falling in love with cities, careers, friendships, art, ambition, freedom, and movement. They are not standing still beside an emotional taxi rank hoping somebody finally feels financially stable enough to choose them. And maybe that's the real ego death for the hopeless romantic.

Not discovering that love no longer exists, but realising how many people approach it like a scheduling decision instead of a genuine emotional collision. I took a sip of my drink one night while another man enthusiastically explained his five-year life projection to me, and suddenly I felt something surprisingly liberating settle into my chest. The hopeless romantic in me didn't die. She simply learned the difference between love and logistics.

We don't need to be locked down, benched, or filed away under "future investments" by men who are terrified of both genuine passion and ageing alone. If modern romance has truly devolved into a game of temporal logistics, then perhaps the most revolutionary thing a woman can do is refuse to play the passenger. Let them drive around in circles, flashing their taxi lights at empty streets, waiting for their corporate clocks to chime.

As for me? I'm putting my phone away, stepping off the curb, and walking into the night. Because I'd rather spend the rest of my twenties chasing an electric, rule-breaking kind of love on foot than spend a single second riding shotgun in a cab driven by a man who only chose me because he was finally ready to park.