Happy, centered, grounded, fulfilled adults—the ones you’d want to date—find dating nearly impossible.

If someone could describe you as happy, centered, grounded, and fulfilled, you make time to see your friends and family at every chance you get—yet you never see them often enough, because your absorbing career and engrossing side interests keep you pretty busy.

Most likely, you have activities planned a few weeks in advance.

Where does dating fit in?

You want to date—heck, finding the right playmate to share all the awesomeness in your life sounds amazing. Yet you won’t put your life on hold in hopes of finding a stranger to meet for dinner, with the even more distant hope that the dinner turns into a relationship.

You’ll make time for the right person when you find him—but not before you find him. Holding your calendar open in the hope that you’ll meet someone to fill it just seems, well, silly.

And how will you know you’ve found him? You need to spend time together. You need to get to know each other. Yet you can’t really introduce him to friends during the early stages of dating, so the time you spend with him needs to stay separate from your other social activities. Given that cancelling plans because you have a date seems as silly as making no plans just in case you get asked on a date, the getting-acquainted process must happen slowly.

And yet—

People you’ll encounter via dating won’t want to get to know you slowly. If they feel a romantic connection, they’ll want to see you many times a week or more—and often for lengthy stretches of time. When you can’t accommodate the desired dating frequency or duration, they get frustrated. Annoyed. Even angry.

They’ll tell you that you shouldn’t bother dating if you don’t have time to date.

A conundrum!