Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

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My wife had been a serial monogamist and had her time taken up by men who lied to her about their intentions. She had been engaged the majority of from 18-26 or so.

By the time she met me she was frustrated about men wasting her time but having no intention of actually settling down and having kids, and so the entire first date conversation revolved around parenting style, I said that I wanted a wife smart enough to work but who wanted to stay at home with our children, our philosophy on child discipline, basically everything about our future lives. It was an interrogation, but a fun one.

She got a lot of blowback from friends who thought this strategy was terrible and she’d “scare men away”. Which yeah, she scared away the men who didn’t want kids or who were on the fence about it.

We knew another woman who got pregnant and then married a guy and they seemed absolutely miserable. Why not just be honest about what you want? Interestingly, if you explicitly say “I want to get married and have kids, if you’re not interested don’t waste my time”, people won’t waste your time.

Even still it took her like 40 first dates over the course of a year to finally meet me, a guy who was totally on board with it. We got married six months later, and have two kids now.

> Why not just be honest about what you want?

I've encountered two significant reasons:

1) You don't know what you want

2) What you want is not kosher in your culture so you'll settle for eating dirt

3. Some amount of people don’t want to feel like the dating process is an interview process, of attempting to insert a “bum” into a “seat”, of finding a “candidate” to fill a “role”. Of course that doesn’t stop it from still _being that_, it’s just that some people are fully comfortable with an upfront, obvious and formal selection process, but many people are not, and want the process to have some amount of an “organic” feel to it.

As with anything with dating, since you have no idea of what a new person’s criteria is, and they may not know either, and since there’s often a certain poker game involved in revealing those intentions, most people seem to opt for feeling it out as they go along. Honestly I think this is fine, it’s just that you have to give each other enough time and space for that, and that’s often a problem

it depends how we meet. if i meet someone through a dating site or some other matchmaking process, i would want to known soon whether we have similar goals in life. and if the goals line up we can go deeper and explore our relationship. if not, we can keep looking for someone else.

but i actually feel that dating itself is not a good approach to find a partner. it is an artificial situation disconnected from your normal life.

it would be better to be able to pick your partner from among your friends, and then spending time with that friend and others as you get to know each other more. many qualities, interests and goals will naturally reveal themselves and common interests and goals will cause you to spend more time together.

dating makes this difficult because you are switching from relaxed activities with friends to a very formal meeting with high expectations where not getting invited for a second date counts as a failure without much hope for another chance.

To expand on 1, it does not have to mean that one has not thought about the subject. It can also mean that one has thought about the subject in depth but has either reached a dead end or has reached a undesirable answer.

Since this is about kids, plenty of people would desire having children from an emotional POV, yet would find it a bad choice for various rational reasons. Such people are in a deadlock and to an outsider would appear as not know what they want.

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