CMV: Unless you're willing to commit to some form of consensual polygamous relationship, it's selfish to treat dating as trying out different partners.
I want to preface this by saying I don't have an issue with other people having non-traditional relationships as long as those relationships are consensual among all parties. This is more concerning a situation where one person is simultaneously "dating" more than one person, none of whom have any idea the others exist.
This is coming out of a situation where I ran into a girl I was seeing on a date. We had really just started getting together frequently but all signs were pointing to things going really well. A few days went by and I didn't mention anything because I didn't just want to assume it was a date, but then when she texted me asking why I hadn't hit her up recently so I asked what the deal was with the other guy, who had her hands all over her and she seemed into it during the brief moment I saw them before she saw me. Without even hesitating, she just blatantly said she was on a date and got defensive before I even responded. Quite frankly, I was upset and I'm still kind of annoyed about it, and it didn't make it any better when she justified it to me by saying she's not looking for anything monogamous or serious.
Usually when people feel led on, it's because nothing sexual or romantic happens. In this situation, she totally treated me like we were getting somewhere but in her mind I was just a fwb. If that were clear from the get go, I'm not sure I would have complained, but she let me get attached.
In any event, and I don't mean to sound too conservative or too bitter because I'm basically over it at this point, I'm writing this because I feel like there's a relationship between how we've empowered young people, especially women, to have a lot of no strings attached sex. How some people, of any gender, have taken this is that it's ok to test out multiple relationships at the same time before making a decision.
Many people don't do this, so I don't want to sound like I'm making huge blanket statements, but I'm not sure how people are supposed to trust relationships if it's considered appropriate to be half in half out of every relationship and commitment. People today are more selfish and more flaky and more indecisive than ever, and I really just think its because society has overemphasized the importance of having options. I think it's incredibly selfish to test out those options while dating someone, no matter how early on in the relationship it is. If you aren't sure about someone, break up with them.
EDIT: I'm getting a lot of people questioning whether or not I understand what dating means. I know in my post that I was clearly caught off guard, but I don't doubt that this is something that could have happened. I'm specifically saying that I believe the promotion of the shopping form of dating is wrong and people should stop doing it. Nobody has challenged me on that yet.
EDIT 2: As much as I love sitting here and reading how presumptuous I am or how dumb I am for wanting some security, this post is and always has been about how I feel people should act. I have no illusions about what kind of shady shit people do to each other in reality, but I think that's wrong and I identified vaguely some reasons why these things have become normal. I'd appreciate someone try to challenge me with some positive reason for why I should be ok with people dating via shopping.
Please, try to CMV!
Posted Jun 14, 2019, 1:41 AM UTC · edited
Perhaps the context of dating is different where you live, but in the US, dating means seeing multiple people without any expectation of monogamy. Couples need to agree to "be exclusive" in order to add monogamy into their relationship. Testing out options is the whole point of dating.
To put it another way, here is the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on dating:
This means the most basic definition of dating is trying out different partners for an intimate relationship or marriage. Unless you are saying that all dating is inherently selfish, I think you just have a misunderstanding of the word dating.
Note, this misunderstanding isn't that uncommon. Dating is something that people generally do when they are relatively young (i.e, in the second or third decade of their life). Many cultures have different ways of approaching it, and there's no formal class on dating. It's easy for people to develop misunderstandings. This is especially the case in your situation when you've developed feelings for someone who didn't reciprocate. But even if it's understandable, it doesn't change the definition or the first sentence of Wikipedia. You had a misunderstanding, and in the future you won't. It sucks, but it's a learning experience.
I'm American. If my English wasn't good it's because I'm tired from work.
But this is exactly the behavior I'm arguing against. I don't care if someone chooses to date someone for a short while and then openly decide not to be with them anymore. That, to me, is more acceptable than simultaneously "dating" multiple people. Even if something happened and one of us hooked up with someone I wouldn't have cared, but she was like out on a date, not drunk at a club out with her friends.
There's nothing in that definition that includes anything about multiple people. I agree and understand that the dating phase is a test, but I think there should be a basic level of decency to date one person at a time. Otherwise it's not really giving that person a sufficient chance to make a good impression. Dating isn't like buying a new car or shopping for the right suit, there's another person at the other end who might think they're doing a good job.
Dating isn't meant to be an extended test. It's meant to be a series of dates with many people to help clarify what you like and don't like in partners, and to help find the one you actually do want to form a long term romantic relationship with. 50 years ago they called it playing the field, and that was in an era before online dating enabled people to find many prospects at once.
You are welcome to your own views, but you are an extreme outlier. It's considered not just the norm, but also the expectation. It's not even based on some new left wing feminist anti-monogamy, pro-sin stance either. Many evangelical Christians take the stance that people should date multiple people at once. There are speed dating events where people go on mini-dates with many people. Every sitcom on TV has some episode where the married friends all set up their single friend with dates as a competition to see who can find the best match. Beyond the sitcoms, this is the plot of a ton of plays, books, musicals, etc. from even several hundred years ago. Dating multiple people at once is one of the most common ideas in Western culture (meanwhile in other parts of the world, arranged marriages were far more common).
This isn't to say that you can't do a bad job of it. You can definitely lead someone on, take advantage of them, screw things up for yourself, or cause some other negative consequence. But dating is an inherently risky process. The traditional process goes from single to dating multiple people, to dating one person exclusively, to being engaged, to being married. And until you sit down and have a conversation that you are going to be exclusive, you are not in a monogamous relationship. Perhaps it's rude, selfish, and it doesn't allow people to put their best foot forward. But it's irrelevant. Relationships require two people, and as soon as one person pulls out for any reason, it's over. Maybe it's not fair. Maybe you didn't get to put your best foot forward. But life isn't fair, and most job applications aren't even read. It's not selfish, it's just the cost of living.
This isn't clarifying preferences. You can do that without having multiple semi-serious partners at once. If you've extended the dating period to point where a relationship is only a label away, then there should be some sort of intention to be exclusive. The situation you're describing is very different and way less developed than in my story.
You don't need to convince me that. I'm no fundamentalist. I think this type of behavior is wrong, but have no illusions about what happened, just an opinion that this kind of behavior should be frowned upon rather than expected. Again, for the rest of your paragraph, those situations are not as developed as my experience with this girl.
Again, I have no illusions about reality, rather an opinion that step two is inherently flawed. I'm not a 10/10 attractive guy and I understand that my occasional cynicism towards dating isn't universal, but my belief is that during step two you should at least give someone you're already seeing and even fucking the benefit of the doubt by not actively seeking other partners. This is nothing to do with some conservative religious moral compass, rather that it's just polite to not be fake with people.
The fundamental problem here is that you thought the relationship was only a label away, and your partner thought the relationship wasn't even close to that point. They were not interested in having a monogamous relationship with you. They didn't have that conversation with you, and didn't assign that label.
If marriage is a signed contract, an engagement is the presentation of the contract, you didn't even have a signed letter of intent. If being single is just walking on the street, dating is just walking around in a store without a commitment to buy anything. It's sad if you are the salesperson who got their hopes dashed when the customer walks out of the store, but it's completely reasonable for them to leave.
There is a time limit to dating. Women generally want to have kids by the time they are 35 to avoid an increased risk of birth defects. Women especially need to date a lot of people quickly in order to find a suitable partner. Men have a little more time, but also generally want to find someone sooner rather than later. Dating is fundamentally a numbers game. You have a 1 in 100 (or 1 in 1000 or whatever) chance of finding a good mate in a given series of dates. That means you might need to date 50 or 100 people to find the right person. And people don't have time to date one person at a time. If you date 100 people back to back, it takes far longer than if you date 100 people 2-3 at a time.
I might sound harsh here, but I do empathize with you. Pretty much everyone in the dating pool has similar experiences. It's a big part of being human. But the pros of dating multiple people at once eclipses the cons of feeling dumped. Relationships are about mutual compatibility, and quickly finding a match is more important than the short term pain of being dumped (or the unpleasantness of having to break up with someone).
This is especially the case because labels don't matter. Your partner might have dumped you even after you chose to be exclusive. They might have cheated on you even after you were married for 10 years. If you were going to experience heartbreak, you were going to experience heartbreak no matter what. Finding the best possible match is the best way to avoid this problem in the long term. And if it was a good relationship, they wouldn't have to make it official. They would have wanted to be exclusive with you even without officially having "the talk."
At the stage of dating without exclusivity, the goal is to make a hypothesis (I like X person), and then stress test alternative hypotheses (maybe I'd be better off with Y person instead). Then only after you've confirmed you like X, become exclusive. I'd say it's not just a good idea to date multiple people at this stage, it's an obligation. You owe it to your future partner to be 100% sure that they are the person you want to spend your life with before you commit. And seeing multiple people at the same time before becoming exclusive is the only socially acceptable/ethical time to stress test one's relationship.
I'm not just making a wild conjecture here. The reason why dating multiple people at once is the norm is because it's the process that leads to the most stable, happy relationships in the long term. It speeds up the dating process to find the best match, and it allows people to stress test the relationship to make sure it's the best match. It makes dating unpleasant in the short term, but it leads to better monogamous relationships in the long term. And that's the real goal of dating for most people.
I'm European and very much an old soul and have never felt comfortable 'dating' multiple people at once. I find it doesn't sit well with me morally and it takes away from the intimacy of getting to know someone new. I'd rather focus my energy on one person at a time rather than thinking the grass could be greener, which I feel is a major issue that comes with online dating.
"This isn't clarifying preferences. You can do that without having multiple semi-serious partners at once" This type of dating doesn't have "semi-serious" relationships. They're all casual until you decide to be exclusive with someone.
To date multiple people at once without letting them know is inherently dishonest and if you think that’s the norm it explains why so many dating relationships fail utterly and are poisonous to people’s psyche.
And when does it stop counting as just dating and begin to be a relationship?