On dating
I have what appears to be a serious, debilitating mental block. A block that I appear to need to break to have any chance of finding a significant other, but one that is currently so ingrained that I don’t even want to break it.
The block is that I think traditional american dating patterns, typical western dating patterns, are a retarded way to meet and get to know people, especially if you’d like to find someone to spend the rest of your life with.
I mean, from what I can tell*, this is how dating works:
Person A is at some public venue, and sees a person that appears to be attractive or at least interesting to them, based almost entirely on visual cues. Person A approaches person B and begins a conversation with zero value.
A: “Hi, I’m A”
B: “Hi.”
A: “So, having fun?”
B: “Oh, yeah, I’m having a great time!”
A: “What’s your name?”
B: “Oh! I’m B”
A: “So’d'ja meet some friends here?”
B: “Yeah, we come down here after work a lot. It’s a good place. You?”
A: “I’ve never been here before, but I like the it. The DJ is really good.”
…
Gag me. I have watched/listened to/and once or twice even participated in one of the introductory conversation many times, and with rare exception they make me LESS interested in 1) talking to the specific person and 2) talking to any individual ever again.
There are exceptions, I won’t deny it. Some of the folks up at castletown and I have had conversation that are worthwhile.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes these conversations can be fun. Occasionally you’ll find something (unmemorable) to talk about and laugh about together. But I cannot for the life of me recall what I’ve talked about on those meaningless but fun conversations, and that adds to the meaninglessness of the whole thing.
Moving on.
So, armed with at least a basic attraction to the other person’s physical presence (by which I mean to include things about they way in which they hold themselves), and, I suppose, a lack of annoyance inducing by their speech patterns, person A now asks for a phone number.
Anyway, I’m getting out of my depth here, but it seems to me that now you’re in interview mode. Rather than showing the other person who you really are, you now go into a CYA mode of trying to show your better side while still being “fun”. “Fun” is of course the most important thing for you to be, although you’re left to figure out what the other person thinks of as “fun” from your limited store of data, and vice versa. Whatever you do, however, do NOT be yourself. For instance, if I may quote the article “Impressively Proper” from this month’s St Louis’ Sauce Magazine, “‘What you decide to order could be a big deal. You want to stick with things that aren’t overly complicated”, yada yada, tons of rules about how you shouldn’t act normally at first.
Basically, my view of dating is that you put off actually getting to know the person for as long as possible, get some physical and mental play out of it, and basically avoid the real parts of the relationship to get you started. And that’s backwards to me.
It’s been a well known fact among those who know me well that I prefer to date friends, recommend dating friends, because to me, friendship is absolutely key to having a successful relationship. And all the best couples I know reinforce that concept. Mom and Dad. Joe and Theresa. Flip and Shelly. Andy and Asha. Nathan and Laura. They’re all FRIENDS. And most of them were friends before they were lovers.**
So for me, in a perfect world, the dating would start after you’ve already gotten to know a person, had some good conversations about meaningful stuff with them, gotten mentally close to them a bit. Then you can start exploring the romance. Anything else seems backwards and destined to be doomed to failure. And I should note that meaningful stuff doesn’t have to be weighty topics. It can be long drawn out discussions of hobbies or stores, but the interesting part is how it relates to who they are. You don’t get them on any real level in those safe, fake conversations with people you’re “dating”, because that might display something that isn’t palatable to the ‘everyperson’ out there. Dating is like big-box retail shopping. You’re only allowed to display the stuff that is going to have a chance of being bought by every single person that walks into the shop. Friendship is more like the long-tail method.
Anyway, so as far as I can tell, everyone I know around here subscribes very much to the “dating” method of doing things, and on top of that, they also do the ‘once I know you well enough to call you a friend, you are off limits to romantic consideration’. So where does that leave me? Well and truly isolated.
Of course, there hasn’t been a lot of real depth to most of the friendships I’ve cultivated around here, either. There are maybe two, three people that I’ve really gotten to know on any kind of level, but they both have many other pulls on their time, so I don’t get to see them nearly often enough to fill my needs.
And don’t even get me started on the fact that I have to work to get any physical contact (i.e., hugs and cuddling) around here. Don’t even get me started.
In conclusion: if I am going to continue to live far removed (in space and time) from the friends and family that I really know, and if I want to have any shot of finding someone locally to fill my closeness needs, then it looks like I’m going to have to break my mental block and do things ass-backwards. Blah.
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*I have been on, to my recollection, one traditional “date” in my life. It was the summer I worked Goucher’s reunion, with one of the other reunion workers. I would’ve been…between sophomore and junior year, she had just graduated. I had a good time, but I don’t remember what happened afterwards. I don’t think I ever called the girl afterwards, because I didn’t know where to go from there.
** Despite hating this word in this usage because it cannot help but sound trite, I can’t think of a more accurate, single word to use here.
A long dry spell, eh?
You could call it that, I suppose. It’s more of a note that I don’t really want to be single, and am thus doomed to be single forever. :-/
I hate to ruin your frame of reference here, but your father and I started dating because we each experienced such a strong attraction to each other that for months we would always check to see where the other was in big gatherings or at any time we thought the other might be around. Truthfully, it must have been primarily a physical attraction between us, because we hardly knew each other at all and there was no logical reason for it – we had very little in common at that point. (I loved cats; he hated them. I hated hunting; he loved it. I’d never worn jeans; he rarely wore anything else. He was immersed in sports; I was lukewarm at best towards them. Neither of us was particularly interested in politics. He was a Kansas boy; I hated Kansas. I’m not sure that anybody thought our relationship had any chance of survival at all.) Our friendship developed as we dated and as our relationship progressed. In many ways, you could say that we grew together.
In fact, I would say that many relationships founder precisely because they don’t or can’t make that transition from infatuation and excitement to friendship, “mature romance,” shared goals, and “pulling together in harness”. (Sorry for the mundaneness of that last image, but I think it’s an important one.) One of your uncles (who shall remain nameless here, but I suspect you can guess which one) has a real issue in this area – as soon as the infatuation wears off, he’s gone. Unfortunately, he’s not too unusual. An awful lot of people – egged on by our media culture, it often seems to me – seem to feel that when the “excitement” is gone, the relationship is done…but in my eyes, that’s actually when it’s really beginning.
I just read an article by Bryan Welch in the latest Kansas Land Trust newsletter that had a paragraph I noted. It fits perfectly here:
“Love sometimes leads to intimacy. Just as often, though, intimacy leads to love. Most of us probably married a young beauty with whom we were infatuated. Twenty years later, if we’re lucky, we love a middle-aged person wtih whom we’ve built a life. Two different kinds of love, even when it’s the same people involved.”
FYI, the overall article was about why some people love living in Kansas, despite its apparent lack of stunningly beautiful physical attractiveness.
For your father and I, love led to intimacy. We were lucky and we also just stuck together and worked at it when things weren’t going too well. I’m hypothesizing that Flip & Shelley and Joe & Teresa were the same way, but you’d have to ask them. (Remember that by the time you were old enough to pay attention to your parents’ relationship, we’d been married for 20 years or more.)
Many longtime couples move from infatuation and early romance to friendship and more mature romance even before they get married. I suspect Andy & Asha were that way; Dad and I were too. Laura & Nathan seemed to develop love from intimacy and friendship, from what I understand of their early relationship.
Ultimately of course, there are as many different ways of developing a longterm relationship as there are longterm relationships. I’m rooting for you to find (or recognize) your life partner any day now. And I’m sure that you will find her, when the time is right for both of you.
Sometimes it’s sure hard waiting for the time to be right, though.
I had quit looking myself until a friend introduced me to the Professor. As you know, we’re pretty inseperable at this point. Just when you think you’ll never find someone…you trip over the right one. The Prof is a good person to know….she’ll have a new crop of victims…er…I mean students…starting in the Fall.
In response to gaia:
You and PW did trip over each other in the halls of your high school though. And although it was years later you got around to sticking together permanently, it wasn’t until years later, and, perhaps, some burgeoning friendship? that you ended up getting married. Yes?
The whole point of this post was that the infatuation stage doesn’t do much for me. It’s not that I don’t get infatuated. It’s just that if that is the only interest I have in a person, I am perhaps too quick to recognize it and discount there being any possibility of anything else, even if in reality there might actually be possibility.
Plus, I’ve been spoiled by being able to be with women that I *knew* were smart. I don’t like having to dig for smart. I like it to smack me in the face, best yet, smack me around a bit by challenging me. Doesn’t happen real often in the settings where I am likely to meet anyone.
@ Racefan:
And situations like yours give me hope. :-) That’s why i need to get back to college. So I can meet single professors. :-D
Time from notice to marriage: 5 years. Time from serious date to marriage: 3 years (2+ of which were long distance in an age with out computers, cell phones, etc. Paper and many $$$ of long distance). Time from marriage to friendship: unknown. Had to work through physical attraction and learning to like each other first.