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Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

For me at least that immediate sexual attraction has definitely worked out very well and resulted in long-term relationships. It probably helps that sex first, questions later is more socially acceptable where I’ve lived than it seems to be in the US. My wife and I didn’t even get married until our kids were 5 and 3.

The idea of courting where to put it bluntly you are campaigning to get someone to see you as worthwhile is pretty weird.

Which isn’t to say relationships aren’t hard work but that it’s not front-loaded. At least in my experience.

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The other point of view is that parents splitting up is very traumatic on kids, so effort should be spent on trying to avoid that. A promise to stay together (marriage) is one possible way to try to avoid that.

I don't think courting is trying to front-load the effort, but rather to avoid back-loading effort. Raising kids is a lot of work, and to prove that the two of you are willing to put effort into that, you put effort into planning cool dates while courting. Once the kids come along less effort is spent on cool dates, and more effort is spent on the kids.

That’s making an assumption one route does better than the other. How do you know your assumed correlation isn’t backwards? Or that parents staying in an unhappy and abusive marriage isn’t very traumatic on kids?

In all my long term relationships we lived together for a long period of time and only one resulted in children. So I don’t think courting was particularly required to get to know one another or find a stable situation to raise kids.

On top of which the idea that planning cool dates is a good proxy for raising kids or even long term compatibility is utterly hilarious.

And that’s dodging round the implication that the main reason to have a relationship is to have kids which isn’t true at all.

Well to me, its less getting someone to see you as worthwhile and more getting someone to see you for who you are and letting them decide if they like what they see.

I spent some time in my life doing the dating thing, attraction first, and they weren't bad times, but they weren't things I wanted til I die. For me, the only long term relationship that matters is the last one. Doing things the way I've always done them wasn't going to work, and honestly I wasn't particularly looking, I just stumbled into someone that I thought was amazing and decided to do it right. There's sex before marriage, but it didn't start off as a sexual attraction. I didn't want to mess around and see where it goes, I knew where I wanted it to go, and I was upfront about it.

Being deliberate about what you want, and clear and open about wanting more from the start, it is a risk, it is easy to put the wrong message out there, and it is work from the get go. Putting the effort in to show that you really care, that this is really what you want, and that you're not some clingy weirdo trying to wife up the first girl that looks at you is not easy in today's environment.

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