There is more than one kind of relationship!
It's exhausting to constantly hear about romantic commitment as if it's the barometer for all relationships. That's absurd!
Did it truly never cross your mind that a person can have more than one meaningful relationship in their lives? No wonder people are so lonely!
You don't need one or the other: you can participate in a close friendship and casual sex. You can have several of each.
No relationship must last forever, either; or be started at the same time.
Relationship isn't what we are, it's what we do.
Someone can have good friends and also someone they spend everyday with for 50 years.
That doesn't have to be the same person every day. It can be 50 different people. It can even be your self.
The casual sex "choice" doesn't apply to the majority of adults (most straight men don't have the option of multiple sex partners, most women don't want them) so it's difficult to see its relevance here.
If you mean throughout their life rather than concurrently, that doesn't really affect the idea that marriage itself is of special significance.
The trick is to prioritize the people around you, rather than material gains for yourself.
Just a few more pulls and the big payout will come. You've spent so many quarters on the slot machine, it'll definitely pay out at any moment.
> thought the same thing when I was younger but now I'm in the prime of my dating and casual sex life.
I had a very charismatic friend who ended up in this situation of being a sex partner to 4-5 very attractive women in this sort of poly relationship thing.
Just like the first time you go to the bar and it's full of alcohol and people, it was fun. Genuinely good looking women and he just had to have sex or sometimes fun adventures with them. None of the "gunk" of relationships, none of the work.
Well that fun doesn't last very long. Pandemic happened, everyone isolated and went to their "nesting" mate and uh.. it wasn't him. He wasn't anyone's #1. He was just a convenient sex toy who bought dinner.
He still isn't anyone's #1.
You sound like someone who has won at gambling.
Your success is not the only possible or valid path.
What you have shared may be wise advice, but advice itself is never a guarantee.
I decided a while ago to be better at being with people, and started preparing myself toward that goal. It's taken a while but I'm doing well now. Also I've set myself up for success by living in a place that attracts and fosters the kinds of folks I like to spend time with -- this is really super important, people aren't the same everywhere you go. Then as summer began coming on this year and people seem to have dropped all those pandemic-time idiosyncracies I've been giving myself ample opportunity to mix with extended friend groups and random meetups (mostly bike rides and races in my case) to great benefit for everyone involved.
The expectation is that I'm filling a void with casual relationships; and that that void is a single committed romance.
I never had that void to begin with. I sincerely am fulfilled by uncommitted relationships. They aren't casual to me: they are as serious and meaningful to me as monogamous partnership is to my parents.
The most important part to me is empathy. I crave new ideas and perspectives: I get them by empathizing with more people.
How much of that is social expectation? I can see the circular reasoning here: can I get out?
That is a challenge. Social expectations set boundaries: changing those boundaries takes a lot of work. It's still possible, though. To me, it's worth the effort.
That implies a need for faith and trust in a person. Where does is that need come from? Committed romance.
If that isn't my goal, what do I have to fear?
I'm not here to belittle you personally. I'm here to confront your ideas.
What are you here for?
It's clear there is no separation between church and state. People just debate the religion of the "church".
Yes, we can change social expectations and boundaries. We did change social expectations and boundaries. It was called the "Sexual Revolution" and it happened over half a century ago. It's old news. This is where we've ended up since then.
I could really use an aftershock.
This is precisely the issue at hand.
I'm not pestering you for sex; in fact I am not pestering anyone at all! Yet here you are pestering me for expressing an interest in it.
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Am I a pest for leaving the Mormon Church? Am I a pest for drinking alcohol at home?
Whatever happened to the religious freedom y'all keep telling me about? Can I have some?
No but there does seem to be a strong correlation between people who were raised in strict religious households and a strong predilection towards sex. I kind of already assumed that you were ex-religious before you said so.
You are free to believe and do whatever you like, but don't presume that everyone else is a prude because they don't look at sex the way you do. Or that your perspective should be the norm. People overwhelmingly choose and hope for monogomy despite society largely accepting casual sexual encounters as "normal". There's no telling the extent of the damage that has done to people's ability to pair bond successfully and develop interpersonal relationships.
I won't. I'll assume they are a prude when they call me a "sex pest".
> Or that your perspective should be the norm.
I just have to accept the inverse. Got it.
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> People overwhelmingly choose and hope for monogomy despite society largely accepting casual sexual encounters as "normal".
I would like to live in that society please. Oh right, you want to vilify it because casual sex offends you; and you are not alone, which is precisely the source of my troubles.
I have plenty of deep and fulfilling interpersonal relationships. I'm quite good at that, as it happens.
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What the fuck do you want from me? Do you want me to pretend I actually crave committed monogamy? Wouldn't that make me the actual pest?
That doesn't sound any different from asking my trans friends to pretend they are cis or my gay friends pretend they are hetero.
I would much rather be honest. Unfortunately, this social situation you are holding over my head is making it a lot easier to just stay silent. Thanks for that.
Straight women’s sexuality is drastically different from gay men, lesbian women, and straight men. It’s not much of anything like the rest. There’s a desire for the attention and approval of straight men (probably due to patriarchal reasons) but there’s often a missing desire for the straight men as they are. (I assume this is more biological) It’s why we see so many straight women being completely content with living an asexual lifestyle whereas straight men are completely miserable.
My theory is that this dynamic is mostly narrative-based, but partly physical:
Our social narrative says that a man's sexuality is dangerous, and that a woman's sexuality is fragile. It also says that safety comes from commitment.
The physical difference (that applies to sexual intercourse) between cis men and cis women is genitalia. The penis is homologous to the clitoris, and the vagina is homologous to the prostate. When a cis man has sex, he probably uses his penis, but when a cis woman has sex, she probably uses her vagina.
Most people who have mastered prostate stimulation can tell you it requires a completely different mental approach (headspace) than penis stimulation. This rules out most cis men, to whom the prostate is usually on a spectrum from unfamiliar to taboo: that gives queer/gay/trans people kind of opportunity advantage.
The headspace I'm talking about here is more of a yearning for connection (to connect with the prostate/vagina), as opposed to feeling impressed with and excited by someone's figure (to connect with the penis/clitoris).
The feeling of safety and commitment that can be found in a monogamous relationship is a really effective way to get into that headspace. This means that the utility of a committed romance can be directly applied to a cis woman's sexual experience, in the same way porn can be applied to a cis man's experience. This is where goals can be misaligned categorically along the boundary of sex.
In all sincerity, it sounds like you're just talking out of your ass. The world exists around you, not inside your own mind. You are no more or less special than me.
Those can never fulfill what a life partner is.
Friends are great. Casual sex can be great. Neither of those give you someone who is so close to you they become part of your identity.
Casual sex especially can be deceiving if one person is using that as a vehicle for emotional investment and the other isn't. That's how people get deeply hurt.
Relationships end. Even the most loved partner eventually dies. Your friendships and casual sex friend relationships probably end more frequently, are shorter and never have the chance for depth.
Maybe you find the right person and get deep quickly, but that's like giving up a savings account hoping to win the lottery.
You know that sex is not exclusive to intimacy. Do you know that intimacy is not exclusive to sex?
I have found the right person many times. I don't stop when I find them. That's like putting all of your investment into one stock.
Maybe you did win the lottery. That's great! Should I be expecting the same experience? I don't.
> Casual sex especially can be deceiving if one person is using that as a vehicle for emotional investment and the other isn't. That's how people get deeply hurt.
That's what a lot of marriages are. The only resolution to this situation is communication.
Why is that communication difficult? We have a strong social expectation for exclusive romantic commitment. To pursue non-committed romance is to break that social expectation. It's difficult, but not impossible.
We would all be better off without that expectation. If people felt free to pursue casual relationships, they would be more likely to self-select away from the dating pool of serious-commitment seekers.
Instead, we have people being dishonest and subversive about their relationship goals, because they feel it is the only way to fulfill their need for sex and intimacy. They end up in a relationship with someone who depends on their commitment, but that very commitment is a lie: a lie told to the other person, and often even to themselves.
Trying to equate them all as relationships is a misdirection. Relationships with your friends, parents, children, and spouse are not going to be comparable ever. They each have their place. We are trying to flatten them out to how they make us feel. This is an obtuse hammer for an intricately shaped interior.
Example: children are about the future, friendships are not commitments, parents are a compass, spouse is life insurance. (I am simplifying to make a point.)
If you try to expect your spouse to give you the same feeling like your parents do or your children do, that’s a disaster. If you try to think of your spouse in the same way as your friend that’s a disaster too. Spouses require commitments. Friends require recognition. Children require care. Parents require service.
Reality is that much of society has forgotten what a spouse is supposed to be and tries to reinterpret it as friendship. It’s the reason why we are so broken.
If you're simplifying you're missing the point of this. But I suspect you're not just simplifying to make a point, but this is actually what you believe.
Maybe you've never had a really close friendship that you've felt obligated to keep alive. That requires work to fix something about it. It's absolutely a commitment. You can make any level of commitment to anyone. It's not a sexual commitment, but for example how many people have you wronged if you sleep with a friend's spouse? It's not just your own spouse.
You've also wronged your friend in that. And I can tell you, if you have children, that the fallout from that likely means you've wronged your children. The same act functionally affects all of those people in a similarly meaningful way. That makes them all reasonably commitments in the same way that you see marriage as a commitment.
There are pieces of a friendship that you are agreeing to or the friendship will end. That makes it a much weaker contract, but also means it requires a lot more work to keep alive. Parents/family are the opposite of that. Because the contract of parenthood/family is so strong, it's a lot less work to keep that bond well. But you can absolutely fuck it up and cut people loose.
Back to the point made before, relationships are being defined as feelings like feeling obligated to keep it alive. You are kind of bottling the definition of relationships to just "feelings" and ignoring relationships formed with explicit terms, like marriages are made.
Some relationships are defined by blood and some by a contract (like a marriage contract) and others by history. Some relationships are friendly. Some relationships are self-serving and when the needs are met or if they change, the relationship disappears. Virtually all non-blood relationships are bound by an implicit "trade". If the trade ceases, the relationship disappears.
The rest of the points you made are lost on me. I don't know which direction you are going in. It might be etiquette and courtesy, which are governing principles of respect. And respect is also a form of trade.
My siblings and I aren't close because we're related. The proof of that is my parents and I aren't close. They rely too much on thinking they don't have to show up for the relationship because "they created/raised me." My siblings, friends and romantic relationships know I could end the relationship if I'm unhappy with it. They are all the same, and all invested in it. They don't think they deserve anything special from me. They know they have to earn it.
I don't feel obligation to keep these relationships alive. I just do because I've gotten good things out of them in the past. If you think there's something special about the contract of marriage... I gotta tell you, that divorce is a thing.
There is no difference between any of these. I can join or leave any of these relationships as I like, and I do for the same reasons. Maybe not the exact same reasons, but the same general reasons of "I'm getting less out than I am putting in".
Sorry that your world is so deeply broken where blood relationships don’t mean anything to you. Family is family and that matters more than friendships. Even if you find greater acceptance in other social circles, family is always going to be different.
Joining and leaving relationships isn’t the only kind of relationship that exist. Some are bonds that you cannot break. Some are contracts that you enter into. And some are transient and fleeting, like you described.
Virtually all relationships are a trade. No trade means no relationship.
4. I don't know what you mean by all relationships are a trade, but it's the most similar thing I see to my other assessments except that you have a strange carveout for points 1-3.
But this single conversation isn't representative of the entire rest of their life! Just because they are angry with you does not mean they are angry with everyone else! If you can't see that, it's because you are a narcissist.
You think what you are saying is what everyone is saying? On the contrary! I'm a person, and I'm right here saying something else!
> You make your own world of explanations to feel like everything is ok.
We've just illustrated that is what you are doing right here. This is a pretty clear-cut case of projection.
Are you just too old to know any better? I don't buy that sentiment at all: if you can read, you can learn.
Nah, I'm angry with you, as a rational reaction to your narcissism. You should do something about that.
Something to consider working on...
If you can’t, that’s something to work on.
Just gonna jump in here and say, I was not angry in this post. So that's just a wrong assessment...
> You are too young to know any better.
I don't know how old you are, but if your argument depends on me being in a specific age range, I'm going to guess you're too conceited to have an actual conversation with. In practice, I think the signs of this were there from the start but I engaged anyways, so that's my bad. But uhh, stop being rude on the internet? It sounds like you should know better for however old you might be...
OOC, what in the initial message makes you think I was angry when I'm telling you I was not? (Oh all-knowing-being who can tell me what's inside my head that I cannot even see)
Certainly not with that attitude!
I don't require commitment, therefore I am not interested in a spouse.
Remember: I am not you.
The alternative is definitely that you don't understand that people are different from you, which is pretty wild to me.
You don't see it this way, but unfortunately, "traditional" marriage & gender roles, including having lots of kids has become an ID pol issue for political conservatives and the religious right. In the past, we see conservatives attacks on abortion and espousal of replacement theory. Very recently, we've seen legislation come up to try and do away with no-fault divorce. Also see the tradwife movement.
Surely if age has made you so much more wise, you would be prepared to express that wisdom.
On the other hand, if age has inflated your ego to the point you are unwilling to even consider a different perspective, then why are you here?
I can understand you disagreeing with me. That's fine.
But where is the substance of that disagreement? All I see right now is indifference: you have discounted my opinion, not rejected it.
The purpose of discussions like this is objectivity: we don't need to wait around to be proven wrong when we can confront the ideas head on now.
Framing this as “cope” (why the Reddit language?) just spits in the face of friendship.
And I feel this way because I see people all the time who are the opposite of this. They have to be in a relationship. The moment someone is out of a relationship, they have no coping mechanism for it, until they get into their next relationship. They take no time to process it. They are dependent on the relationship, and can't function without it. I have seen this from men and women. These people disappear when they're in a relationship. Like, I have friends who are only my friend when they're single.
That's not healthy. That's people conflating sex with being loved/important, (and I can absolutely confirm I've seen people do that as part of this). If you don't know what loving/being loved is, it's real easy to assume that whatever you experience that's closest to it is what it is.
There's a Daniel Sloss quote that "If you only love yourself 20% someone can come along and love you 40%, and you'll think 'WOW that's so much that you love me', but it's literally less than half of you that you love. Your self esteem is just so low that you're letting people love you less than you should." (Paraphrased). That's what we risk in people not learning to be okay with themselves as a single people.
I have a great relationship with my self. I'm not enough to fulfill all of my needs.
I'm great at platonic intimacy. I'm super empathetic, and can (and do) get into deeply meaningful friendships very quickly. Sex isn't in this picture.
If I honestly wanted to, I have no doubt that I could find a serious committed romantic relationship. I don't want to. I know that because I know myself.
What I'm good at has solved many, but unfortunately not all, of my problems.
I have long questioned the "deeply meaningful friendships very quickly" thing.
A while back I set up a model of relationships that's something like a probability cloud. When you first meet someone they have whatever your standard probability cloud is of actions they might take. The only way someone can really hurt you is by acting outside of that probability cloud. As you get to know someone the list of actions that you expect in their probability cloud changes pretty dramatically.
I have a 'friend' who isn't a close friend, but I was friends with both him and his partner. He cheated on his partner (probably, I don't know for sure, but it's sorta moot, and I believe that he did). And I remained friends with both of them, in spite of feeling like this was a really shitty thing for him to do, because at the end of the day it wasn't really outside of what I expected for him. He didn't wrong me, because he consistently acted in the way I expected him to.
That said, I also don't have a deep friendship with him, because at a certain point I realized that it wasn't the kind of friendship I would want with him.
Your friend broke a commitment to your other friend. In doing so, they proved a level of disrespect to commitment itself, and that damaged their friendship with you.
But what if they didn't make the commitment in the first place? What if they knew that they wouldn't be any good at monogamy, and said so upfront? Could they have avoided this entire situation, and upholded a respect for commitment; all without changing their behavior?
Our society has an implicit expectation that romantic relationships be based on commitment. That's not the only thing a relationship can be built on: your relationship with your friend was based on respect.
I want to build my own romantic relationships on respect instead of commitment. Is that really such a batshit insane idea? If not, I could really use some external validation.
TBC, I'm still friends with the person, probably because I never respected them for their commitment to others in a romantic relationship in the first place. I also don't have any strong feelings to uphold monogamy, so I definitely need to have an expectation that someone cares about monogamy before that's something I will judge them against. While I think this person definitely subscribed to the cultural norm around monogamy, nothing about their personality told me they were invested in it.
Looking at it through your framework of respect, I didn't feel like they lost my respect for cheating on their romantic partner, because I didn't really respect them enough in the first place to think they wouldn't. :D
It definitely wouldn't be how I would approach respect for a romantic relationship, but I also would just never be in a romantic relationship with the kind of person that I hold in such low regards.
You can see it as the modern extension of the tribe (lingual dialect, culture, religion), but over a greater area due to homogenization.
(Though perhaps we have gone too far in that respect...the USA in particular is a very large diverse country.)
Make childcare not a choice between living in poverty and not, and people will have children again. Many of my generation including myself can't afford children despite us wanting to.
The worst problem is obviously housing costs and cost of living in general, coupled with wage stagnation. We don't want women to be stay-at-home mothers for good reasons, but society as it is hasn't caught up with that - not to mention it's financially impossible. Our parents generally could afford that, as even simple factory jobs paid enough for a good home (that they owned and could build equity for themselves by mortgage, no less) and the mother to stay at home to actually raise the children.
The US also has the problems of healthcare cost and a rise of anti-abortion laws that place the life of a fetus before the life of the mother, I can completely understand anyone not wishing to risk death from childbirth.
I don't think we should want women to be anything in particular. Saying they shouldn't be stay at home mums is wrong, just as saying that men shouldn't be stay-at-home dads is wrong, if they can afford to be. And society has caught up in the sense that house prices are driven up by bids from two-person incomes.
not all women—my wife, for example—agree with this sentiment.
we bought a house and got married, but my income alone is not enough to pay our mortgage, bills, food, etc.
we want to have children as soon as possible, but unfortunately we don't know when that will be, purely due to financial constraints.
in the meantime, my wife must work to supplement our income to keep us afloat, and to accumulate some savings for having children later on.
I'm a full-time-employed programmer for our local school district. in an ideal world, my salary alone would be enough to support raising a family. but, today, this is not the case.
fortunately, we may have a solution that could work for us, as it's presently working for a close friend: have the wife run a small, in-home daycare for a few other children, in addition to taking care of our own.
it's a less-than-ideal solution—we'd love to have the mother of our children spend her full time and attention on just our own kids—but that's not really feasible in today's society, unless you are lucky to have generational wealth or some such.
and, of course, this is all from the perspective of someone who doesn't have any sort of temporal limit on my ability to procreate—I can only try my best to understand how my wife feels, living through her prime fertility years anxiously waiting for the Right Time To Birth Children, purely based on financial constraints.
but anyway, believe it or not, there are women out there who would love to do nothing else but raise children and take care of the family home, while the husband provides income through work. it's really unfortunate that we've chosen, as a society, to sideline the desires that these women have for their lives, which were the unquestioned societal norm only a few short generations ago.
If you're a resident of a developed country in the year 2023, I guarantee you that the vast majority of your ancestors were poorer when they had their children than you will be if you have children now.
Now, you may not need to be married as per how it's defined by the state, but there are some number of benefits especially related to health when it comes to long term partnership. Trying to say being single is fine, then dying a few years younger may not be the best way to evangelize your idealism.
- Wanted to be partnered - unsuccessful at finding that long-term partnership.
- People who didn't want to be partnered - and there's likely subgroups here:
- People who aren't desiring of much social contact at all.
- People who are highly social but not desiring that long-term romantic partnership, and have a lot of relationships of varying degrees of attachment throughout their lives and strong social ties to others - including close friendships.
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Most literature I've seen on the "unmarried people die younger" doesn't really seem to look at anything beyond maybe splitting the never married | divorced | widowed groups.
It can be a true statement for that as a whole but not necessarily true for the "unmarried by choice with an extensive network of close friendships + social connections" group being suggested by the article and by most "learn to love being single" people.
They likely don't look a whole lot like the lives of the "unsuccessful at finding a partner" or "dislike social contact" groups.
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To counter-argue myself though - the average number of close friends + social connections has been shrinking overall in the population. I don't know if it's great advice for the average person, since they're objectively doing worse at building those possible alternative connections than prior generations. And I'm not sure it's because they're too laser-focused on a partnership.
Humans are social creatures. Meaningful interaction is literally as important as eating, drinking water, and breathing. We don't say we're addicted to those things; those things are just necessary for life (well, I suppose with eating there's shades of gray).
The concept of "exclusively pairing off with a romantic partner" is one of the most pervasive and universal patterns across all of humanity. Any culture. Any location. Any time. There are exceptions (polyamory shows up every once in a while), but they're vanishingly rare compared to the norm. Its not just cultural; its absolutely biological. Some would say its related to reproductive drive, but what's fascinating to me is: wouldn't one male / multiple female polyamory maximally optimize reproductive outcomes? I'm content in saying: I don't know why, but pairing is absolutely a biological need.
Loving yourself is important and great. But that's different from "loving being single". There's a long list of human needs, and there's really strong arguments that trying to shed them will just force you to look to fill that void elsewhere, sometimes worse (the most compelling one I've heard is how religion fills an amorphous-need-for-spirituality in humans, and without it we've turned to spiritualizing things like tech companies / cars / capitalism in general).
There have always been adults who never paired off into romantic partnerships. Not so with breathing.
US divorce rates are at a 50-year low.
Most of the people who would have been getting divorced in the 1970s, today look like a relationship that fails after a few months or years, before reaching the point where they would have decided to get married.
This notion that two people being in a long term relationship can somehow suffer systemic failure or attack is bizzare.
No objection re: children though. We've done an absolute number there via cost of living.
I'd probably group them all under the umbrella of social connections failing, which I'd consider one of the biggest issues of US society today.
I have to wonder if people, and newer generations in particular, just fucking suck at socializing.
Humanity has very literally never had it easier to communicate and socialize, and yet somehow the vast majority consider themselves isolated.
It's easier to socialize when you are physically beside someone.
There are less kids playing in the street. They are no arcades.
As a parent you must bring your child to other children. You must encourage or mandate extracurricular activities.
We are not a society where children are naturally surrounded by other children in their 0-4 years.
We are not a society where adults are naturally surrounded by similiar adults outside of the in office work space.
Its a matter of proximity and what is the default state.
That's shocking to hear. We live out in the sticks, about 25 minutes from the nearest town (of ~10k people) and we make sure our kids get some social time a couple of times every week. From homeschool coop groups to random meet ups/activities planned by parents via Facebook to farmer's markets, library/museum trips, churches, parks, visiting neighbors... seems like my kids are always doing something which seems to help them socialize. I think it would be sad if they just stayed home all the time. I suppose being in a traditional marriage where I work and the wife raises the kids helps contribute to this being able to happen.
All of these other than visiting neighbors are exactly the things nightowl means when saying they're not naturally surrounded. You're having to arrange the homeschool co-op, you're arranging playdates on Facebook, you're taking them to the famers markets and museum trips. You're facilitating them going to these places, probably by way of car.
Comparatively, growing up most of my childhood days other than school and one weekly extracurricular most of my time was just naturally playing with the kids in the neighborhood. We'd all just play in each other's yards, we would just go to the playground ourselves, etc. These days you would have CPS called.
Which is to say their doesn't seem to be any indication that "marriage is failing" i.e. there are less people in marriages. It's also notable that the rate of cohabitation has tripled over the last 20 years[2] (included because it's a worthwhile proxy for things which are long term relationships but might not be recognized as marriages).
Where I can point to fertility rates across the Western world falling to below replacement and say "yeah we've got a problem", the notable thing is that it seems thoroughly uncorrelated with people being in long term relationships. People might not have time for friends, but there are more committed relationships around then at any time in history - by the numbers.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183663/number-of-married...
[2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/unmarried-par...
I suspect that accounts for a decent chunk of people not getting married, but still being in long-term relationships unless there's some evidence these are substantially different types of relationships (i.e. not intimate).
This probably understates things, if anything; as you get older, you're more likely to get married, and America's population has been aging.
Pew data shows that marriage is down 14% since 1990.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...
Saying these people fail because they don't get married feels like imposing a certain viewpoint on others. I'd say it's a problem if they want to get married and can't find a partner. Incels are a problem. People who are happy with their life aren't.