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One and Only, or Shop Around?
There are two philosophies of dating and finding a partner.
There is the idea that some people can find their person at the get-go. This means that dating further is without purpose and sticking with it, learning how to be in a relationship, and making a commitment is paramount. There is the other idea that one never knows unless one has experience of the world. Why settle down when you can sample the finer things in life? Why settle down when you can check around and maybe find something better? How do you know that you want what you’ve got unless you see what else is out there? By see, of course I mean experience.
Which one is more valid in the eyes of conservatives?
Is it more virtuous to know what you want and only date someone when they meet those qualities, then make a commitment from there? Is it better to see what qualities you might enjoy in a partner and see what kind of people there are in the world that you might want to make a life with?
What about you? Are you a one and only? Or are you more of a shop-around kind of a person?
I’d like to say it’s simple for me, but I find that I’m much happier settling down with someone now that I know what I want for sure. Yes, it’s what I’d always wanted from when I first started dating as a teenager, but now (having dated around) I am quite certain of what I want!
What should we encourage?
What say you?
Published in General
Was just having this conversation last night concerning the best instruction to give to hypothetical teenagers.
1.) “Experience” needs to be well defined here. As in all things, there is a learning curve to dealing with the other sex in general, dating, courting, and marriage. So, yes, it is good to gain experience, but we are talking about the inter-activity type of experience, not sexual experience. Which, in addition to being more appropriate to marriage, also covers over personal flaws in the general, dating, and courting relationships. Which means that sex can blind you to the problems of a given relationship until after you married, and then -having already been used to get through the earlier relationships -is no longer available to get you through marriage.
2.) Dating should be taken neither too frivolously nor too seriously. There is a happy medium between “I will only date those I think I might marry,” and “who am I going to bang tonight?” As a first approximation, you should not date anyone you do not like, but anyone you do like, you should be open to 3 dates to see if something develops. If it doesn’t, move on immediately. Appreciate the experience gained, but don’t waste either of your time. However, you owe no one a date -and if the person is of poor character, break it off immediately.
3.) Neither a friendzone, nor a friendzoner be. If you want to date someone, ask them. Any answer other than “yes” or “I can’t that day, but here is a specific future date at which I am free and would be interested…” is a “no.” If they do not either agree, or offer an alternative date, move on. If someone asks you on a date, recognize that at this point there does not exist an answer of “stay friends as we are.” The options are “yes” or “no.” Neither party is done any favors by stretching out the unresolved sexual tension.
I would only add in contrast, my earliest mentor, was a guy who having gone through the line at the grocery store heard the checker say, “Come again.” But what he heard in his mind was, so the story was told, “I love you.”
She said that he was a nice guy but had no interest in him; but he would be at her home talking with her parents when she got home from work, and they liked him personally, and he would bring her flowers and gifts. But she wasn’t interested.
And he pursued her for some years before she went out with him, and finally married him, after which they had three girls and then grandchildren, and overall a great life.
Persistence was once a good thing.
[I added a bit more to this comment.]
Cultivate friendship, common/complementary interests, have recourse to faith/spirituality – either shared or mutually understood and accepted. Laugh together…Try it ’til you find it; then, don’t let it get away. :-)
Well I don’t recommend my method: which was flail about clumsily and desperately and somehow, two decades later, magically manage to have a wife and kids.
That assumes you know what your own core values are. What if you are the person that changes? For instance, I’m a Catholic conservative now, but for the first decade or so of my prime dating years I was a skeptical agnostic libertarian. I’m not sure what course my life would have taken if I had met and married a woman who shared those core values.
This. This should be clearly taught to all teenagers, because some of us were clueless, and no one taught me this, and I didn’t figure it out on my own until I was maybe 30 (and no, I’m not exaggerating).
It worked for me.
Yes, of course you’re right. Personally I think that you should know who you are and what’s important by the time you’re an adult, but that seems to be less true than the opposite. Nevertheless we are not four-legged animals thrashing in the night.
And yet, to your point, I knew a man whose wife suddenly changed, and laid down new rules, such as no more praying in the house or in front of their daughter, then took the child and got a divorce. The man was blind-sided and terribly hurt. But it don’t think that there could have been any way to foresee this. I don’t know how this story ultimately ended, and I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but it was pretty bad when I knew the guy.
There are no guarantees in life, are there. But I think some things do work better than others.
Ideally perhaps, but it’s rare in these confused times. “If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at 30 you have no brains” may be a cliche (and for the record I myself was only ever a liberal in the classical i.e. libertarian sense), but a lot of conservatives I’ve met here on Ricochet and elsewhere are former liberals who only became conservative once they were “mugged by reality.” That generally only happens after you leave the warm, safe cocoon of family and the college campus and actually have to earn a living and pay the bills in the real world for a while.
I’ve known several Indian colleagues who had arranged marriages, and it seems to have worked out well for them as far as I can see.
That would be how I learned it, yes.
I think this is all very solid advice. I should bookmark it for later when talking to my kid about dating. I think #2 is one of the more difficult things to do. Most people are not willing to date someone that they are not immediately attracted to or that immediately appear to share similarities. These are all good elements of advice for people who actually want to meet someone who will be a life-partner.
I think a part of the question really is why do we date? Are we dating for fun or are we trying to discover things about ourselves and others that we might want in a partner? Once those questions are answered, we can proceed.
If we’re just dating for fun, it becomes much less important to date someone with similar views and values. These relationships, however, necessarily have an expiration date. There will be a point where one person will want more in life and will no longer be happy to be partnered with someone who cannot ultimately share a home or life.
I think that depends on the definition of “dating.” If a date just means “would you like to meet for a cup of coffee?” then presumably it’s not such a big deal to go out on one date with someone you just met and only find marginally attractive, right? Whereas if “dating” means some sort of exclusive and likely physical relationship, then the bar should be much, much higher.
College has upended the mating-dating rituals of the past by creating a four(-ish) year period in people’s lives where you’re not living where you’re going to be living and you aren’t in a position to settle down or even put much effort into a relationship.
This deferred future/artificial present is the source of LUGs, hook-up culture and the like.
There’s got to be more to it than that though, because college was apparently once a common place to meet one’s future spouse:
My advice is to draw up the things that are absolutely non-negotiable for you. Then, consciously and deliberately, put everything else on the table.
Marry the first person who checks all the non-negotiable boxes, and for whom you tick all their boxes. Both people agree to compromise on everything else.
Then, if you both invest deeply, it can and should be a good marriage.
Marriage is not a chemistry experiment where, with the right ingredients, you get the right output. It requires mutual ongoing commitment and willingness to grow and change. And it is impossible to control the future by controlling the inputs.
In all fairness, we went to a small Christian college in rural Pennsylvania. Hooking up and whatnot, while it did happen (a friend of mine had to get married in a hurry after finding out he was soon to be a father), was culturally discouraged, while dating and marriage were strongly encouraged.
How strongly encouraged?
Well….
In the summer before the start of our freshman year, in mid June, the college hosted a Freshman Orientation weekend where incoming students and their parents were invited to come preview the campus, sign up for classes, meet the profs, etc.
We all gathered in a huge auditorium, and the academic dean of the college (a very kindly and elderly lady, and herself a graduate of the school) stepped up to the podium and introduced herself. Then in her very next breath said these immortal words (which she used for every freshman class):
“Now I want all of you students to do something. Look to your left. Now look to your right. Look carefully… Your future mate may be in sight!”
Legendary words, they carried the full weight of either a blessing or a curse on all present for the next 4 to 5 years. But you know what? She was right. A great number of my friends likewise met their wives there. One of the sweetest such stories was a couple who, while friends there during those 4 years, were not close friends. They both graduated, went on to find jobs, and then ran into each other a couple of years later. They’ve been married now for 14 years.
I met this incredible girl when I was 19. I proposed four days later.
We had very little in common. But we both met the other’s “non-negotiable” requirements. And we invested and gave and loved and learned and grew.
When I was 19, I considered myself the most blessed man. Now at 47, I know I am.
Please G-d, we will be blessed with many more years together.
Dating (post-1900) has got to be one of the worst ways to find a spouse. Whatever happened to parents? To matchmakers? I tells ya, the devil’s in this.
Why yes, I am single. How did you guess?
Dark hair and eyes, lol. But yes, rather barbaric. One was very eastern german and the other is slavik.
OK, maybe my tossed-off comment about colleges inventing bisexuality and destroying marriage as an institution and ultimately dooming us to an apocalyptic future where we outsource child-rearing to radioactive wolves was a teeny bit overstated and not entirely free of subtle shades of unsupportable nonsense.
And sure, you’ve got, you know…facts. Evidence, testimonials, that kind of thing.
But the computer models I am working from are sound.
Wait, don’t stop. This sounds interesting.
Both of you sound like my experience. I’m sure I would not either.
Hmmn, y’all remind me of this song:
We are spoiled in this day and age. We can make so many choices that people are treating others (and dating) like it’s an Amazon order. You should get exactly what you want, reasonably, and exactly when you want it! Life, unfortunately, isn’t like that. More importantly, people aren’t like that.
Chemistry is one element, but it is only one element. There is no perfect partner. There seems to be a myth out there that the perfect partner just accepts you the way you are. I think this is part of the charge of the Experience Crew. You can’t find the one that will accept you and all of you without trying it out on everyone.
I don’t think that’s the way to go for anyone. It leads to total rejection as well, which is soul-crushing. We have people who are looking for someone to accept them and are instead being wholly rejected time and time again while looking for some person who will magically just love them.
At least the value of input from people who know us and our backgrounds. A very important aspect of my decision to ask the now-Mrs. Tabby to marry me was the opinion of my mother, my brother, and several long-time friends,.
Such input is somewhat harder these days (37 years later) because people at marrying age are less likely to be living where they grew up and around people who have known them for more than a few years.
Those people are also not easily available when a person contemplates divorce.
Sure, thirty or more years ago. Now, I’m not so sure.
True. We have friends who, during a particularly difficult season, said the primary reason they didn’t pursue divorce was knowing they’d have to explain it to a whole bunch of people who had been with them when they got married. [As so often happens, after they got through that difficult season, they found their marriage to be even stronger.]