Do I have an unrealistic conception of dating?

I used to not think so, until I started dating a girl who was completely perplexed at my ideas about what you are and aren’t supposed to do in various stages of commitment.

Me, I take a relationship very seriously. I don’t get into one unless I can see a possibility of marriage. I’ve got no problem with the one night stand or even my favorite, the elusive twelve night stand*. But to me, once you’ve decided to be in a relationship, there is a certain mindset you need to be in.

A relationship being generally that you’re a “couple”, you introduce each other to strangers as your boyfriend/girlfriend, etc. As soon as this happens, you switch gears. Cute and interesting people are now long lost siblings. Any possible interest is discarded, the same as you would for a hot cousin, because it’s just Something You Don’t Do.

My mother, most of her friends, and my (now) ex all seem to have an impression that until there’s a ring on that finger and you say “I do”, you’re a free agent. Exclusivity applies to sex and everything else is fair game. Curiously, they all share histories of failed relationships, but maybe that’s just bitter old me looking for proof that I’m right.

That seems so counter-intuitive to me. If you want to keep dating, stay single. For the love of god, just break up with whomever you’re with. How can you expect to truly develop a relationship when you aren’t fully invested in it?

*After having sex with someone about six times, you really start to get good. After twelve, you get a whiff of repetition. It’s very scientific.

You can never **assume **commitment or exclusivity. If you haven’t discussed it, it’s unreasonable to assume that the other person is on the same page.

And yeah, you can get into a relationship with an eye toward marriage, but until you’re *actually *married, either of you is free to leave, for any reason. That’s what makes “married” different than “not married”.

There’s nothing wrong with your concept of dating. You just can’t take for granted that it’s *everyone’s *concept of dating.

As DianaG implied, you get to have whatever conception of dating you like. But MARRIAGE is a civil contract which is so orthogonal to what propels most dating behavior that I strongly advise you to disentangle the two enterprises. You will be much better off asking your parents to use their experience to select a suitable marriage partner for you. Seriously.

When you’re married (or living together in a situation like marriage) a few years, you start to see how all those relationships you thought were Deep and Important and Invested really are pretty ephemeral compared to actually being married. Once that happens, I can see being much more loosey-goosey about non-married relationships you may have in the future.

I don’t do exclusivity.

I don’t understand the desire for it, either. You think they wear out or something? Or is it a disease thang?

It’s a bit insulting, personally. Despite everything that is said between me and whomever I’m dating, there will always be that nagging voice reminding me that they are fully aware they could do better and are on the lookout. That makes it difficult for me to stay together.

There are many conceptions of dating. Yours is much like mine was, and my friends was, when I was in high school. “Dating” was pretty much as exclusive as marriage, and usually there were even class rings exchanged. (My boyfriend wore mine on a chain 'round his neck, I wore his wrapped with yarn to make it fit my finger.) You would **not **go out on a date with another person with out breaking up with your boy/girlfriend first, lest ye be branded a whore in the lunchroom.

My kid is now in high school, and the times they have a changed. Or maybe the geography, or maybe it’s just his particular social group. They’re much more likely to hang out en masse, and who’s “with” who can be a bewildering puzzle requiring flowcharts and a GPS to work out. He was “with”* four different girls this summer, but only one of them was elevated to the status of “girlfriend”, and even that was no promise of exclusivity. Of course, he personally may be polyamorous, I haven’t asked, and I doubt he knows yet anyhow.

Like AHunter3, I don’t do exclusivity (anymore.) Actually, something he said in a thread not too long ago reverberated in my soul, and I realized the wisdom of it, so I’ve adopted it as well, and mentioned it to a few partners: I neither give nor accept promises of monogamy. That doesn’t mean I’ll dump you if you don’t have another partner at all times, but if you’ve stopped looking out of some monogamous intent towards me (even expecting me not to do the same), I’m not comfortable with that.

I think it’s always safest to have the conversations and make them explicit, whether you’re expecting monogamy or polyamory, fleeting or permanent. A whole lot of pain and agony in relationships could be avoided by people simply communicating and skipping the whole assumption part.

And while you’re talking - be specific. Like really, really, specific. I inadvertently pissed off my husband once because he saw me “making out” with another guy in front of him, and he wasn’t cool with it. I was so confused, because I knew that would bother him, and I couldn’t recall having done it. Turns out he views a kiss with tongue as “making out” and I didn’t. I would have called that “kissing”, and defined “making out” as touching breasts or genitals over or under clothing while kissing. Once we clearly defined our terms, I was able to accept or decline (I accepted) that rule knowing exactly what it meant.

*And no, “with” doesn’t mean they’ve had sex, either. Or even seen each other naked. Just that they’re, y’know, together. Or something. :rolleyes:

Or, maybe, they have a history of entertaining but limited short-term relationships.

To me, a failed relationship is one in which two (or more …) people are locked in bitterness and misery.

If your mother has several friends who share her out look on life, I’d say she has a history of successful and ongoing relationships. (Sex isn’t everything.)

I’m absolutely convinced of the possibility that my outlook is the product of a relatively short experience in dating. Not that I have trouble finding women I like and like me back, but that there have so far only been two women I actually liked enough to want them to be my girlfriend. My experience with the last girl, who is older than me and has had a number of relationships, and the general consensus from the only women of an older age bracket I have input from–my mom’s friends–has told me that maybe my outlook is naive. That’s why I’m soliciting opinions. Thanks, everyone, I like to get as many perspectives as I can.

Sorry but this whole statement seems kind of stupid to me. Why even get married which by definition is a formal promise of monogamy?

I agree with Influential Panda. If you want to play the field, play the field. Don’t hedge your bets by attaching yourself to some chump who is willing to put up with your bullshit.

Not like I’m a perfect relationship guy or anything, but I’ve heard too much crap from friends of mine (both male and female) who create all sorts of loopholes to justify their behavior. People generally know if their partner has an expectation of monogamy and faithfullness.

To me, and probably at least some other polyamorous people (although I don’t speak for WhyNot, obviously), marriage isn’t about who I’m having sex with. Although I currently have romantic and physical relationships with two people, I’m only living with one. I only share a bank account with one. I only plan to have children with one. Marriage is, for us, an economic and life-plan (long-term strategy? I’m not sure how to describe it) commitment. Sex and affection are not things my husband and I need to keep exclusive to each other, but when it comes to planning our careers and finances and homes and future children, the married couple is the one that’s taken into account.

(There could be a whole other thread on different forms of polyamory and what happens when polyamorous relationships become polygamous relationships, but let’s stick with this for now.)

You’re a free agent, unless the person you’re dating has asked you not to be and you’ve agreed. There are a lot of people who feel as you do - I felt the same at one point. Now my perspective has altered to the less common “Anything goes, as long as everyone’s agreed to it beforehand”, but certainly your dating ruleset is not rare or wrong in any way. You just need to make sure you and your potential significant other are on the same page.

I knew I liked you from previous posts. 100% agree.

My concept is like yours, Panda. My husband’s was the same, when we were dating, and now it’s still that way, but even stronger. (I’m not denying that there is certainly a whole extra level of psychological, financial, love, and everything else commitment with marriage.)

It’s not a promise of monogamy for everyone. For most, yes, but not all.
That being said, if that is how you define dating and are comfortable with it Panda, then go with it. Just be sure that the person you are with feels the same way.

I agree. Don’t give up on your idea (unless you want to). I had some serious moments of self-doubt with an ex-boyfriend, whose idea of commitment was WAY different from mine. I thought, “Am I crazy? Am I extra-sensitive? Insecure? Unrealistic?” but I realized we just had drastically different views. Which is fine. We’re just not together. And I’m really happy about it. :slight_smile:

Quite early on in my relationship with my (now) husband, I sat him down and said:

“I want to get married and have children. While I’m not expecting to do either of those things right now, I need to know whether that’s what you want too, because if its not I need to end this relationship”.

Luckily for me, it was. After that it took us four years to actually get married, but we both knew that’s where we were heading, and treated our relationship accordingly.

It’s not your fault if the person you want to be with doesn’t want the same things as you. It is your fault if you don’t check that out fairly early on and just assume they do, or find out they don’t and then hang on in there hoping they’ll change their mind. It’s highly unlikely they will.

Disease thang. When I found out that my bf who kept talking about marriage and kids was running around more than the cars in an F1 race, I wasn’t half as pissed about the running around itself (after all, we had not talked about it, I had assumed wrongly that when someone is asking me to marry him he means one-on-one) as I was about him not using condoms with “the other ones” (his words). The part that made me see red was the “you’re asking me to get preggers and you’re not even taking basic hygienic precautions? GetoutahereNOW!”

No matter what your outlook is, honest communication is the key. All of this stuff needs to be very clear and you both need to be comfortable with each others’ outlooks.

Personally, I’m reluctantly uncomfortable with monogamy. Yeah, I would love it if my SO thought was was the most beautiful girl in the world and found everyone second rate compared to me. I would love it if he wanted me and only me.

But I know that’s just not true. We are all such complicated beings, and part of the ways we are complicated is the complicated feelings we have towards everyone around us. Yeah, it would hurt me to see my SO having feelings/doing stuff with other girls. But at the same time, it’s not his job to protect my ego. Life hurts sometimes. I can’t expect someone to suppress such an important part of who they are just so that my feelings don’t get hurt.

I recognize that my desires for monogamy are not about him, but about my ego and my desire for control. And I feel like these are things that I need to learn to deal with myself, not things I can expect someone else to build their life around.

If I got married, it’d be because I wanted kids. And then I think there would be more expectations. But I’m not “looking to get married”. If it’s the right time and the right person it will happen. But god that’s not something I think about early on in a relationship.

In the meantime, I’m about enjoying time with people that I like being around.

In my opinion, it’s not my SO’s responsibility to make sure my ego gets bruised. Monogamy or not, you could get dumped at any second for whatever reason. Those are feelings we all have, and it’s something we all have to come to terms with.

What I don’t do is externalize my insecurity into a mass of expectations I hang on someone I “care” about.

I have to wonder what kind of man (or woman for that matter) is willing to share his finances and have children with a partner who doesn’t want to be exclusive sexually. I suppose one could take an attitude that sex is a recreational activity no more intimate than a game of raquetball, but I find that it ends up rarely being the case. Even in raquetball, people tend to get resentful when their partner blows them off for another partner.

msmith357, **Daerlyn **did an excellent job of answering. I’d be happy to answer any other questions in another thread, but let’s not derail this one, okay?

Alternatively, you can do a search on my username and the term polyamory and get more hits than Soul Train, I’m sure. I’ve fielded many questions before, and you might find them answered already (although I don’t promise the answers I’d give today would be identical to those I gave in the past - I’m a changing evolving person and my ideas change with me.)

My point in posting that here was to give an example of another “conception of dating”, as the OP put it, and a specific example of detailed communication and understanding of pitfall assumptions, not to discuss or debate non-monogamous lifestyles.