I was having a conversation with a friend earlier this week. She’s a confident woman who speaks her mind, and is always dating somebody. In fact, right now she happens to be dating a few people. But she’s a little freaked out about it. She keeps asking whether she has to choose right away, and I keep telling her no. There’s no reason to rush when you’re still gathering information. Dating is not a race to the finish line, and you don’t need to force clarity before it’s actually there.

Anyway, we kind of went in circles, because there seems to be this expectation that either you’re playing around or you’re in a committed relationship. There’s no middle. When really, dating is a process. This means it takes time. You reveal yourself in stages, so exclusivity too soon might mean you’re surprised later. It takes many dates to figure out what exclusivity even means to you. That middle space is where you actually learn who someone is and how you feel around them.

I love Professor Kerry Cronin who talks to college students about dating. Instead of being fearful that dating is such a commitment because it leads to relationships, she advocates looking at it as a process—“gathering information” is all you’re doing for the first several dates. And it takes a long time to get to that exclusive part, if you even get there. That makes dating feel a lot less overwhelming. It gives people room to be honest without trying to force a label too soon.

Anyway, there’s no reason to feel like you’re a player if you’re dating more than one person. Everyone is entitled until you have commitment, until you are both ready to have that conversation. And there’s no need to rush to get there. If you don’t know what you want yet, then you’re not deciding too late—you’re still figuring it out. The goal is to move toward something real, not to pretend you already know where it’s headed.