The only thing I decide in thirty seconds is whether or not any one person is a creep that intends to harm me. Thirty seconds is not enough time for me to decide whether or not i want to have sex… I don’t care to use the three date rule either, because i don’t think it tells me very much about a man. I like the waitress rule for helping decide if someone would make a good friend.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2006-04-14-ceos-waiter-rule_x.htm
Yes, the tipping of a waiter thing was a very big deal for me in a relationship I had with someone.
Do you mean in the US? Because anecdote aside, most kids in Scandinavia are born to unwed mothers, and you would have to stretch the word poverty a lot to include them.
Or is morality something that depends on where you live? Do you believe that it’s OK for Scandinavians to fuck each other silly without getting married, seeing as they have such low occurrence of crushing poverty, STDs and teenage pregnancies? Or is it only immoral for people in the US? How about countries that recognize common law marriage?
I am not attacking you. I am really trying to figure out what you believe in.
Well socialism is one obvious solution to the problem certainly.
This isn’t a valid response to anything I’ve written. Either address what I have said or don’t, but I will not be talked to like a stereotype. The biggest mistake I have made on this forum is responding to people who speak to me like a stereotype rather than reading what I actually wrote.
I believe precisely what I’ve said I believe. If you drop the idea that you can pin me precisely to stereotypes that exist in your head it’ll be all the more easy. I never once said it premarital sex was immoral.
So it’s OK for some people to have sex outside marriage. Is that what you think?
It wasn’t a response. It was a question.
So, your opposition to pre-marital sex is based on pragmatical considerations, tied to the specific situation in your country, not moral considerations, right?
The fact that you mentioned illegitimacy as an evil in itself led me to respond to you that way. You did not clarify sufficiently why it was so.
I don’t want to answer to things you don’t believe in, and haven’t said. Which is why I asked you to clarify these points for me. I am really trying to ascertain your beliefs, you seem to be under the misapprehension that I am attacking you, which I am not, so please drop the defensiveness.
I think it’s ok to have sex outside of marriage.
S
I’m not opposed to premarital sex.
I didn’t say it was evil, I just said all things being equal having two parents to care for a child is better than one.
I do not think that premarital sex is evil. My argument is in response to the OP, I am saying that it’s not costless, and that this topic can’t be settled as pat and simply as he would like it to be because both sides have some legitimate points.
Thanks for your clarification. I have just found out that you and I are not in as much disagreement as I first believed.
I too believe that all things being equal, is best for a child to have two parents. I also believe that there is a cost to irresponsible reproduction. Morality aside (and I think premarital sex is completely cromulent) is best if people exercised restrain when making decisions that might affect other innocent people (namely their children), which is why I have one child, and had it at 35, when I was happily married and completely sure I had a partner that was going to be a responsible parent, while still firmly believing that sex can be done casually and just for fun.
I don’t know what your position on this is, but I believe the solutions is to educate people, and give them the life skils and knowledge to protect themselves from the consequences of irresponsible sex (in or outside of marriage). Ditching the taboos and educating kids is one way to go about this. It seems to be working alright in a big chunk of the planet.
I agree, but it’s sort of pat to say education will solve problems, that’s true in 100% of cases. Just look at how ignorant we are here at the Dope, we could all stand to learn more than we know. As I raise my children it is very important to me to lay a foundation for acquiring knowledge quickly and efficiently. My 2 year old already knows her ABCs, the colors, how to count to 10, how to identify numbers and letters, how to climb a ladder by herself and is getting ready to sprint. I hope that she has a more solid foundation at 13 than I did at 18. My knowledge is spotty because I am an autodidact, I hope to give her the tools to be an autodidact or to take instruction well. In this I try to teach her a practical respect for things, the appropriate place for fear as a warning but not as a controlling influence. When she gets older this will apply to attitudes toward sex as well.
Find whatever faults you want in anyone here. That’s fair. However, one thing that shouldn’t cut against anyone here, and not just because it’s an assumption I make as well, but because it’s a reasonable default position, is that of assuming American, or at the very least North American conditions. It isn’t hubris, or national pride, or ego; it’s geography. For the most part, the people who contribute here are from the States or Canada.
And Mswas has already stipulated to the following generalized argument:
Some kids born out of wedlock are impoverished. Some children born into wedlock are impoverished. Now, the task isn’t about agreeing on that; the task we took to was parsing it up.
I think where we left it all we’d really decided is that having more contributing adults to a child is generally better than having fewer. I say generally because one can’t account for abusive parent-like figures. I think, and I could be wrong, that he finally agreed, at least loosely, that isn’t marriage that determines conditions so much as number of parent-like figures.
I think history counsels that whenever more people are working in concert towards a common goal, the results are more easily achieved than when fewer people are.