And I don't actually understand what's supposed to be so pathological about American dating. We go to the movies a couple of times, then have sex? That's supposed to be ass-backwards? Why?
Well, I said it was untidy. It's hard to talk about subtle things without making them sound more definite than they are, but I'm not sure about "totally acceptable". It's not so much that people will think you're a bad person for it, or will give you a hard time over it, but IME, it's kind of Not the Done Thing. Someone who's having sex with friends more often than very, very, very occasionally is falling into a particular role, of the racy, promiscuous sexual free spirit, and even if it's not a role that's heavily penalized, it's not one that most people see themselves in.
It's also worth noting that I think that youngish British people, increasingly, no longer relate to each in terms of quite the same gender roles that Americans do. Americans, seem much more old fashioned in many respects. The idea that a whole group of friends and various strangers and acquaintances, of both sexes, would just go out and get drunk together regularly, and that sometimes they'd cop off with each other and that if it wasn't a totally unpleasant experience they might, you know, do it again, and then if that wasn't totally horrible they might progress to doing 'date-like' things together, just doesn't seem to gel with those more formalised gender roles.
(Obviously my experience is obviously coloured by the fact that most Americans I meet are university educated, middle-class and over here so I don't intend it to be a totally blanket statement about all citizens of the US.)
I think it's more to do with the rise of male-female friendships and the collapse of dating.
When I was in college, like most young women I knew, I had many male friends, and we were just friends. We'd go out to dinner, movies, even dorm dances sometimes, and there was no sense at all that we were dating. Dating would have meant we were at least thinking about having sex, and these were just friendships. We had plenty of flirting, but if people were a couple, they were probably doing the same things with groups of friends, just sleeping together at the end of the night.
But to my mom, all these fun Fridays and dances were evidence of a healthy casual dating life. I had lots of dates in college!
So I think that's part of it. Since male-female social contact isn't automatically teh sex0r any more (I leave that in for you, Weiner), the only way to distinguish romantic interest from just friends is having sex.
Maybe I'm hopelessly prudish and American, but I rather prefer our way. I would way rather stay mostly sober, deal with one person, have all the tingly excitement of dressing up, making eyes at each other, tension building throughout the evening, maybe make out on a park bench, and then have teh sex to look forward to, and be sober when I had it, than just get plastered and have a fifty fifty chance of having to give the "it happens to everyone" speech because my evening companion had a six shots of vodka.
We go to the movies a couple of times, then have sex? That's supposed to be ass-backwards? Why?
It's that we're all (I include myself from my single days) so bent out of shape over finding someone to go to the movies with. We're not comfortable with the British system described by McGrattan (screw around with your friends and see what sticks), but we're also not comfortable with the making-romantic-advances to people we don't know well that you have to do to make the three-movie-dates-then-sex thing work.
Is this not also tied up with the habit of American women to be "dating" (in the sense of not having sex with but regularly going out with, and all right, sometimes having sex with) several men at once? To an outsider, this looks really, really weird and not a little bit screwed up.
I'm comparatively racy, but if there one thing I wouldn't do, it's go out drinking with a group of friends and wind up in bed with one of them. That scenario is public in a way that makes me uncomfortable.
a whole group of friends and various strangers and acquaintances, of both sexes, would just go out and get drunk together regularly, and that sometimes they'd cop off with each other and that if it wasn't a totally unpleasant experience they might, you know, do it again, and then if that wasn't totally horrible they might progress to doing 'date-like' things together
See, this is what I thought single people did these days in the US. Can one of the twentysomethings here enlighten me?
This isn't so much a habit I'm familiar with, or not as a nationwide trend. Serial monogamy is still pretty standard here in the States.
(Where'd you get this from? Old girlfriend who was American? Because if that's the case, she was just spinning you a story: "No, honestly, D., everyone in the US dates several men at the same time. I just assumed you knew!")
3: I had mixed experiences. Often the guys I went out with who said they were just into something fun, not long-term, were really actually totally obsessed with finding teh one, but had recently gone through a bad breakup or whatever. I had a few experiences in which sleeping with someone totally great and wonderful and fun was followed by an email saying "That was so wonderful it reminded me of why I really loved being in a relationship. Since you're not into that, I'm getting back together with my ex. Thank you!"
That, to me, seems psychotic. The worst, though, is when you sleep with a guy and afterward, he says, "I can tell you are feeling something here, and I am too, so I think we should break it off." Actually, I might have been feeling "fun," but don't project your lovey feelings onto me.
I guess I always blamed it on a sort of patriarchal obsession with ownership. "I have fucked this girl and now must either control her every movement or let her go, and since controlling her is wrong, she must be set free." But maybe it's an American thing.
Is this not also tied up with the habit of American women to be "dating" (in the sense of not having sex with but regularly going out with, and all right, sometimes having sex with) several men at once? To an outsider, this looks really, really weird and not a little bit screwed up.
I think this is evidence against LB's theory, for here is a Briton lecturing us about our promiscuity. Why can't one go around with more than one person at once, and have sex with some of them?
I think this is evidence against LB's theory, for here is a Briton lecturing us about our promiscuity. Why can't one go around with more than one person at once, and have sex with some of them?
I think I agree with Tia; I know what you're saying in your "double-bind" paragraph, but I disagree about the consequences. I seldom went after sex without serious romantic intent, but quite often found it couldn't be sustained or wouldn't work. No harm/no foul. And I was ok when my intent was more serious than hers.
I'd choose a different adjective for my dressing-up excitment, though, even if hers is both accurate and precise.
a friend rather than a girlfriend, who was in the habit of telling me about her sex life whether I asked or not (OK I admit it; I asked).
What seemed weird is that she believed herself to be serial-monogamist, but was "just seeing, as friends", two or three chaps at a time, then she would have sex with one of them and that would start a "relationship". Which would then end and another two or three suitors would show up. I suppose it was a sort of early version of "Pop Idol".
She had female friends who didn't think she was weird or unsavoury so I assumed (and assume) it was normal. I tended to feel sorry for the underdogs, who appeared to have been entering a quite expensive and inconvenient auditioning process.
Half of my friends think it's reasonable to sleep with several guys at once, with or without telling the other, as long as there's no "commitment" in any of them. But I was pretty shocked (not mad) when I found out a guy I'd slept with and who intended to keep sleeping with me fooled around with another girl between our first two dates. I just couldn't handle the stress. I made it a rule never to sleep with more than one guy in any 30-day period, so I'd never be in the bind of saying, "So, either you gave me crabs or I gave them to you." Ugh. (Luckily, this never came up, but you never know.)
Another thing that might be at work here is that Americans generally aren't able to keep their college network of friends. Everyone moves around too damned much.
quelle tragedie, that a man should spend money or be inconvenienced by a woman who never sleeps with him. They can also be looking around during this process, you know, and are not obligated to spend time with anyone whose company they don't enjoy, and don't have to spend more money than they feel the urge to.
I don't see what's wrong with this scenario at all.
I've been an underdog, who came to terms with the fact that it meant a lot more to me than to her. The process of accepting that is one of alcohol's great uses. And looking back on it, the fact that it did mean a lot to me is cherishable--not to be regretted.
I should say that I don't think all of the issues described in the post closely constrain what most Americans (college educated urbanites, that is, I can't really generalize much further) actually do, it's more that they create an awful lot of uneasiness and discomfort.
I'm not the moralising kind. But it does provide the economic base to the dating pathology that LB identified; if the cost of liking A is giving up the options on B and C, then it is going to be a bigger sunk cost and a bigger decision. This makes the length of the auditioning process longer than it needs to be and wastes a lot more of everyone's time. If you carry out the auditions in series rather than in parallel, then you have a shorter average audition and it becomes possible to combine it with your normal social life (because you don't have to worry about overlaps).
Since it seems to have been passed over and I think it was an excellent point, I'm just going to delurk for a moment and highlight Cala's #8.
And I'd add to it that I think a non-trivial amount of dating gets started that way these days: friends morphing into a relationship, rather than just starting one up cold with a pickup line or setup.
actually, the causation might work the other way round; if you have a high value on not having sex with someone that you aren't prepared to be in a long-term relationship with, it would make sense to parallelise the search process. Though it still wastes a lot of time.
It occurs to me that I have been completely serial. That is, the sequence has always been AAA, BBB, CCC. There has never been a BA or CA or YA or any other out-of-order sequence. I guess that's an indicator of seriousness. Am I an outlier?
Well, and it's a conflict of basic assumptions. Your friend, and Tia, look to be working with this:
A culture where casual romance (non-serious, flirty dating, with no necessary implication that sex was on the cards) was more normal could work with the American reserve around having sex.
Which is I suppose a functional system, although I can't say that I like it much myself; it's got that whole 'woman retaining her virtue until the value of the wooing gets good enough' thing going on which strikes me as incompatible with treating people equally, and sort of lousy for both parties. But even if it's functional when everyone knows how it works, it's going to confuse the heck out of someone who isn't expecting it.
It's the fact that it's an auditioning process at all that seems alien to me. I just really don't know many people who go about things that way.
It's the quasi-formality of the process and the element of stress/tension in deciding if this person is going to be a 'good' person for you and then using that decision to base the further decision whether to get physically intimate that's really quite unlike how most people I know go about things.
That's the sort of process that people I know go through before they *move in* together, not before they have a semi-drunken snog or spend the night together.
Now I realise that the nature of teh internet and the ease with which everyone can get all verbal and analytic probably exaggerates the real differences in dating behaviour on both sides of the Atlantic, but there's no question that there really are substantial differences.
If I'm interested in seeing or fucking A, but I'm not convinced A should be should be my boyfriend, or he's not convinced I should be his girlfriend, then I might like to check out B or C while continuing to enjoy the company, in whatever respect, of A. For example, when I started going out with Graham he didn't want to be exclusive because he wanted to look for someone his age and marriageable, but we were still interested in fucking. Meanwhile, he went out with another woman we called 39, for her age, and I had sex with a coupla other guys (for inclusive definitions of sex) both of whom were seriously disadvantaged by my burgeoning attachment to Graham, but I am not crying tears of blood for them. Parallel auditions let you maintain a relationship with someone you want to see casually while keeping your eye open for the something that may be permanent.
I've been an underdog, who came to terms with the fact that it meant a lot more to me than to her. The process of accepting that is one of alcohol's great uses. And looking back on it, the fact that it did mean a lot to me is cherishable--not to be regretted.
Absolutely (except the alcohol part--maybe that's where I have gone wrong, not enough alcohol).
This thread highlights a good reason why the French, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Austrians etc. look accross The Channel and then further accross the Atlantic and realise that they understand neither of the cultures they see.
Maybe it is smugness, but the friends and colleagues with whom I have spoken about such matters here universally claim that Central Europeans are just more relaxed about sexual matters that the americans, without going sofar to debase the currency as the Brits. This is a summary of their words, not mine BTW.
when I started going out with Graham he didn't want to be exclusive because he wanted to look for someone his age and marriageable, but we were still interested in fucking. Meanwhile, he went out with another woman we called 39, for her age, and I had sex with a coupla other guys
christ on a bike. I can't even organise a regular chess match.
34: Neither I nor, as far as I can glean, dsquared's friend are working with that assumption. I'm not "retaining my virtue" when I even do wait a bit to sleep with someone, it's more an interest in the buildup of tension, and an occasional need for strong mutual rapport to precede sex. I don't always need that rapport, because sometimes there's an immediate physical attraction that takes care of business, but sometimes the issue is more confusing--I have to go home and think "he's not exactly my type, but I feel fluttery, and I couldn't eat my food," and maybe then I'm still not ready, and I need some time before my attraction really flowers and I'm enthusiastic about sex.
it's going to confuse the heck out of someone who isn't expecting it.
Maybe this gets to the root of the problem. It's not that any particular set of "rules" for dating and sex are bad, it's that for whatever reason we are in a period where the rules are in such flux that it's hard to know what things mean or how to react. Does the sex mean full on romance or does it mean an itch had to be scratched?
There are times when being an old married guy is very good. I have enough problems without having to worry about this stuff.
Tia: Parallel auditions let you maintain a relationship with someone you want to see casually while keeping your eye open for the something that may be permanent.
nicely illustrates LB's point: But even if it's functional when everyone knows how it works, it's going to confuse the heck out of someone who isn't expecting it.
Also: someone said upthread everything is an opportunity cost. In Tia's scenario, it would seem as though if everyone knows the rules, it's all fine. Except that not everybody agrees, at least on a personal level. Some people might mentally write off anyone they come across who is in any sort of relationship -- so that even if Tia is keeping her eyes open for the "something permanent", some of that pool are weeding themselves out because they don't want to come in even on the tail end of an existing relationship (however casual).
It's not that complicated. The relationship is either committed, or it is not. You establish this verbally. You then proceed to do what you feel like until you have a relationship that is committed.
I also think one should be vary of having too categorical opinions of how dating works in your country; even in your own class and age bracket, you'll here a lot of different answers.
I idly wonder what it would be like if you could establish a parallel "not committed" relationship with an employer, and conclude it might be quite fun. Although less so if your employer could establish a parallel, not committed relationship with you.
I also suspect that the fact that women have much less unrealistic self-images than men and thus deal with the occasional setbacks a lot easier, combined with parallel auditioning, might help explain some of the more horrific misogyny one finds on the Yank bits of the Internet.
Tia-- I think all Witt meant is that even if there is full disclosure, you're still not going to have a chance to date anyone who isn't comfortable with overlapping non-committed relationships.
That's not, in my experience, how things work here in the UK at all. I think that's what dsquared alluded to above.
If you're seeing someone -- i.e. you've actually gone out together at least once -- the assumption is that you won't be looking for someone else until you've explicitly agreed that you are no longer seeing one another. In fact, people would be pretty bloody pissed off if you were looking around for someone else. It's rude -- it's like being at a party and talking to someone and realising they are looking over your shoulder all the time just in case someone more interesting has turned up.
More like "moonlighting" in the one case; you're working with other employers. And more like internships in the other case; the employer's testing you out against a couple of others. Both legal I suppose but not generally regarded as the greatest thing.
That's not my experience on how dating works in the U.S. If you're going on an acknowledged date, you're not looking until you've made it explicit to the other person. Because of the whole 'it's a date, there's a presumption of sex' thing.
But my experience is mostly that people hang out in groups of friends until two people starting hitting it off more, then they start sleeping together, and so there's a fair level of knowing each other well before deciding to date.
57 -- are employment relationships not many-to-many? It seems to me employers can employ more than one employee simultaneously, and that employees can work for more than one employer simultaneously, if the latter is not as universal as the former. Am I misreading your post?
57: Well, a source and a result of misogyny, or at least of an expectation that men are going to be misogynist.
Part of what plays into all this is an expectation (which is, I should say, fundamentally bullshit as it applies to most actual men I know, but the idea that men generally behave this way still affects people) that men and women approach each other with basically different goals -- that men want sex but essentially kind of dislike women and would prefer to get sex without having to form relationships or associate with women much at all.
Under this assumption, the parallel dating thing makes more sense -- given that the man is assumed to be assiduously avoiding any kind of attachment until it is explicitly agreed upon, because men really dislike attachment, it's no injury to him to be looking around for other partners. (And given that the woman knows that men prefer to be unattached, her expectations are the same.)
Now this assumption is basically crap -- most men seem to want warmth and emotional connection and all that about as much as most women do (i.e., usually, but not necessarily always), but I think people believe it, and it makes the dating process a little more hostile and uncomfortable.
But my experience is mostly that people hang out in groups of friends until two people starting hitting it off more, then they start sleeping together, and so there's a fair level of knowing each other well before deciding to date.
And I think this is largely true, just that people get much more wrecked about the process than necessary.
To Cala's 64 I'll add that friends play a disproportionate role in (20-something, postundergrad) American sexual psychoses. The urban tribe serves not only to introduce you to potential mates (including members of the tribe, i.e., close friends) but also vets them to a certain degree. If your social scene is organized around a relatively focused nucleus of friendships, you may choose to casually see or sleep with some people, but preserve for the slot of significant dating status someone you can integrate into your larger life. But the tendency of the urban tribe is to know and gossip about the romantic interests in its members' lives, contributing to a division of dating tiers. Some dating is for fun, some dating is actually a part of my life.
70,71: IME the neuroses really set in when a) someone doesn't find their One True Love Ž (or even a decent longish fling) within the group, and b) someone who was in the non-tribe group now has to become part of the tribe without knowing any of the smoke signals, and c) just say, it's a good friend from college and the new non-tribe bride is really uncomfortable that he has a close female friend who is reasonably attractive, has known him years longer than the bride has and they've never acknowledged sleeping together. Hilarity ensues.
Moral: Sleep with all your friends so you can say, "Well, we thought we'd be an item, but that was over five years ago. Congrats!" instead of "No, really, there's just never been any attraction between X and me. Really."
54 was in fact, to 43, but to Witt I will say that in my circles, my understanding is universally held. I have never had any confusion about this ever arise.
My experience is unique, but you always have to learn new rules when you get to a new culture, and New York's are fairly well-understood among everyone I know.
I don't understand 54, Tia. Of course it's complicated, New York or no; it's not as if there is only trans-Atlantic misunderstandings about what people are doing when they're dating. I doubt that dating is as clearcut as your anecdotal experience indicates for even the majority of single people living in the city, and scores of literature testifies to that. Also, I don't see that dating (in practice, not on paper) often works out as binary as you claim. And furthermore, I don't believe that expectations in NYC are so fundamentally different from those of other major urban metropolitan areas in the States that you can claim, "Well, here on the Island, we do things differently. . . ."
77: Um, also a New Yorker here. My basic dating assumption would be exclusive unless very, very, clearly stated otherwise, and I'd be surprised and put off by such a statement (not necessarily irretrievably put off, but put off). So, even within NY college educated middle class circles, there's room for confusion.
So, LB, if you went on a Nerve date, and the next week you met a guy at the bookstore who asked you out to dinner and movie, you'd say, we have to keep it friendly; I have a boyfriend?
I'd say that I was doing online dating, and was thinking about seeing a particular guy again. If I liked the Nerve guy enough to have made plans for a second date with him, I probably wouldn't go out with bookstore guy -- I'd put it off until I'd decided against Mr. Nerve.
Not that there's anything wrong with the alternative, it just wouldn't be my default assumption.
I'm theoretically on Tia's side here, but in practice, by the end of a first date I've already slept with the guy or decided I don't want to--which tilts the calculation in favor of disclosure and non-parallel dating.
I'm writing an article about an art consultant who works in DC. For the profile she invited me to a PR-ish event she was hosting for an artist from NYC ("Debbie") whose parents live in DC. Consultant is being retained to help facilitate this artist's career or some such.
Debbie is a painter with less than a year's experience paitning, but her mother ("Kelly") is determined to debut her and wants to start in DC where she has connections. So Kelly treats a party of 20 people to a three-course meal at one of the finest restaurants in DC. It's truly absurd, the inverse proportion between mother's milk and daughter's talent, but so it goes.
Anyway, I'm seated at dinner beside Kelly, who, it turns out, is a man presenting as a woman. I've never talked with a transsexual in any real length, so I suppose this is an enlightening dinner for me. And she spends a great deal of dinner talking about herself, too. She's a Republican (which genuinely shocked me). She's a life coach and former Feng Shui consultant, and that all seems perfect. Thenthen!when Kelly changes the subject from her person to me, she proceeds to mock me for having a girl's name!
Strong urge to quip, "Funny that we both have girls' names!" and I think she kind of earned it, but I didn't go there.
If I were actually doing online dating, which I never have (it's funny, it doesn't feel as though I've been together with Buck all that long, but I haven't been single since 1995. Online dating was much less mainstream then.) I'd probably be more likely to parallel date, at least if everyone involved was also online -- they'd all know what was going on. My assumptions are based on dating personal friends and acquaintances.
Nevertheless, I maintain that it is widely understood here that there is a difference between "dating" and "a committed relationship." The very existence of that adjective implies that there is an alternatively uncommitted relationship. A not insignificant amount of pop cultural ink has been spilled on making the move to seeing someone exclusively. You'll hear people ask all the time, "are you exclusive?" You're a New Yorker, true, but my experience so heavily weighs on the side of a shared assumption that relationships in which emotional intimacy is yet to be established are not assumed to be exclusive; it is not, in any sense, cheating to go out with someone else that it would take more than you to convince me that this isn't really a shared paradigm.
In college we always just got drunk and had sex with whoever was closest. Dating was something that happened to other people, and even dating started with drunken sex. Sober sex was only for relationships of three weeks or more, which was a positive eon in our terms.
I have never had a 'normal' date in my life. All of this angst miraculously passed me by, for which I thank vodka.
Well, I've got Armsmasher who seems to agree that your paradigm is not universal, and I do have a social circle of people who date roughly according to my expectations (not that I don't know anyone who parallel-dates, but certainly not everyone expects it). I'm just saying that there's room for confusion, unless everything is made quite explicit.
My experience about dating norms comports with LBs. I admit that I'm pretty hidebound. It's not that I think parallel dating is bad or inappropriate or anything; it would just be confusing to me - I couldn't sort out all my motivations. So, at a minimum, serial dating only for the stupid!
I tend to agree with LB about the pathology. Part of this is personal hangups, but for a long time I was really pretty weird about dating because I thought it was somehow wrong to be with someone who I wasn't at least thinking about being with Forevah. This meant that I didn't pursue people very often, when it did it was a Huge Deal, and I had very little skillz at recognizing interest, getting people interested, breathing regularly enough around an interest to talk coherently, etc. So it was a terrible double bind of the kind LB describes.
I would be aware that friends of mine were hooking up, but I couldn't imagine trying to hook up with a friend, both because I couldn't recognize signals (it is possible that they weren't being sent) and because I thought that trying to make a move on a friend and being rejected would make things incredibly awkward in the future. Oddly enough, once I did start asking people out more, I became really good at staying friends with women I'd dated or tried to date.
For sure I had an extreme case of what's being discussed, but I know the feeling. (And FWIW wasn't brought up in a puritanical religion or a particularly conservative area.)
Yeah, I just think there's endless room for confusion, especially given that two people can always walk away from an evening with very different interpretations of what happened. Also, the transition from casual to exclusive is gradual and involves stages, so it leaves room for further crossed signals and misinterpretations.
I don't claim my paradigm is universal; I claim that it is shared, here. I have no idea whether "the island" has any claim to uniqueness, but I've lived most of my dating life here, so I'm limiting myself to what I know. I also don't claim that it's never the case that some people might prefer serial dating and might come to such arrangements with their partners, but that people don't by default expect, of a random person they meet and go out with once, a commitment. People who have such expectations are a small minority here, and I know none of them personally, except LB, I guess.
Witt was saying in the first half of his post that people who didn't know how it worked would be confused. I counter: IME, people know how it works. A noob will quickly learn not to get his/her heart broken because someone (s)he saw once or twice is also still thinking of others.
I did say that "My assumptions are based on dating personal friends and acquaintances." I'd probably have expectations closer to yours if I were more accustomed to dating strangers and near strangers (as with online dating). I think I'd still expect either exclusivity or full, explicit disclosure by the time any given dating partner had made it to the level of acquaintance.
Yeah, Tia, unless you're a lot more active than I would reasonably expect any human being to be, I'm not sure you can claim to have the definitive canvass of NYC opinions. I spent a few years in NYC - just after time LB started with Buck, damnit! - and most people in my circle would acknowledge your conventions, but I'm unaware of any that lived by them. It seems entirely probable that there is a set of hidebound people in Manhattan that is sufficiently large as to allow them to think those conventions (that is, mine) are the norm.
I will also confess to being a little weirded out by the idea of dating more than one person and trying to decide between them. And I don't think this is exclusive to online dating. One of my friends once mentioned that she'd been on four dates this week, and I said, "Oh, online dating?" (which I think she'd been contemplating) and she was annoyed that I didn't think she could get four dates in one week without electronic assistance. I understand why it's a good idea but I think I myself might be incapable of thinking of more than one person as potential dates at once. Or, what SCMT said in 92.
I'm getting moderately uncomfortable here because I feel as though it sounds as if I'm trying to enforce a code of sexual morality, or saying something rude about Tia's expectations and I'm really not trying to do either (well, I have said something moderately rude, in that I think this sort of parallel dating may not be easily compatible with what I think of as treating people equally. But I don't mean to say anything ruder than that.).
I'm just saying that I would be honestly surprised if someone I was dating at all was seeing someone else, and I'd be offended if it hadn't been disclosed. I'm aware that that's not an entirely unconventional way to behave, and that plenty of people do, but it's not, IME and IM social circles, a default assumption.
SCMT, you're conceding my point: people can be in practice serial daters; hardly anyone expects it by default.
Sorry, I wrote badly. I meant that people in my circle acknowledged that there were people who had your norms and that there was nothing inappropriate about those norms. But most of them, I think, assumed that there was a self-sorting process that meant that people they hung out with, and then dated, shared their (my) norms. That is, we assumed that the people we were meeting up with and dating were serial daters. There was certainly room for slight overlap, but less for interweaving dating in parallel. We'd all have felt pretty obliged to have a this is not exclusive conversation rather than the reverse.
I'm not sure that's much clearer. I'm not sure how important it is, either, as I do think self-selection takes care of a lot of this. It's entirely believable that I could move about in one group with one set of norms, and you in another, and neither of us would run into people with the other set of norms much.
A good friend of mine dates more than one guy at a time without a shred of bad conscience about it. She lives in LA. Her argument is that "It's none of their business what I'm doing when I'm not with them until there's some agreement that it is their business."
I think the important qualifier is that she's not expecting any of those dates to evolve into something more serious. She's *not* "deciding between them." It could be argued that she's "sleeping around," except that she has good fun with these guys, they're nice to each other, and she's open to the vague possibility that she might meet someone she'll become more serious about.
Let me jump in and also apologize for being rude; that also wasn't my intention. I think Tia's code holds in my urban tribe, or would if we were going on dates more often, so I didn't intend to levy judgment about her approach.
I'm aware that that's not an entirely unconventional way to behave, and that plenty of people do, but it's not, IME and IM social circles, a default assumption.
I think the problem is really only that people are assuming that their norms are the, well, normal norms, and that's rarely true, and that must be kept in mind.
I think there are two situations being described here.
Abstract: dating someone once does not establish exclusivity.
Concrete: Tia was dating more than one person (but it's clear, from what we know now, that she was seeing Graham more seriously, if not exclusively, than the other people she's dating).
I'm fine with the abstract, but in the concrete situation, if it were clear that Tia and Graham were not exclusive, but further along, than Tia and I, I'd probably think twice about dating Tia (at that time). Which is to say that if everyone has the same information, you can make your own decisions.
Also, I often find it hard to believe Tia and I went to the same high school.
Re: 49: Maybe this gets to the root of the problem. It's not that any particular set of "rules" for dating and sex are bad, it's that for whatever reason we are in a period where the rules are in such flux that it's hard to know what things mean or how to react. Does the sex mean full on romance or does it mean an itch had to be scratched?
No, no, no! All other things being equal, the best set of conventions is the set that maximizes happiness. That set, I think, will tend to maximize guilt-free fucking (without compromising honesty, integrity, etc.). I think Idealist is right that a serious lack of clarity in current norms (as evidenced by the fact that we can't agree what they are) causes a lot of trouble. But not all conventions are created equal, and some will involve much more strain, hypocrisy and masturbation than is strictly necessary.
If SCMT wants to corroborate LB, and attribute his beliefs to his whole social group, then I must have made an overtotalizing claim. (I'd be curious: how many years ago, SCMT?) The reason I brought it up in the first place was to assert that there are environments where these assumptions are shared enough so that it was rarely, if ever, a problem, which I still think is true, since I never encounter anyone who doesn't share my expectations.
As I told LB in email I'd say on the thread:
Which is I suppose a functional system, although I can't say that I like it much myself; it's got that whole 'woman retaining her virtue until the value of the wooing gets good enough' thing going on which strikes me as incompatible with treating people equally, and sort of lousy for both parties.
is wrong.
and so is this:
Part of what plays into all this is an expectation (which is, I should say, fundamentally bullshit as it applies to most actual men I know, but the idea that men generally behave this way still affects people) that men and women approach each other with basically different goals -- that men want sex but essentially kind of dislike women and would prefer to get sex without having to form relationships or associate with women much at all.
I'm never waiting "for the wooing to get good enough"; I'm waiting for a clear feeling of mutual attachment, which doesn't happen right way for everyone in all circumstances, regardless of their sex. I could as easily say that serial dating plays into the expectation that women always fall with their heart, not with their 'nads, that they're never interested in sex with different people, sex for its own sake, etc. The first time I met Graham I was genuinely confused about whether I was attracted to him; he was much older than anyone I'd ever been involved in and he didn't look like my picture of a sexual partner. It was only the fact that I couldn't eat and ripped my bread into little pieces at our dinner that made me think I was attracted to him, because I recognize that as behavior from situations when I'm less ambiguously attracted. (I used to have breakfast with my college boyfriend before we got together, and I took these super stiff gigantic bagels from our dining hall and reduced them to a pile of crumbs while not touching a bite of my food.) I was still confused for a while, but I wanted to continue seeing him. But it certainly wasn't something that I was positive I wanted to pursue, and if someone else had come along, I would have wanted to say "hey" to him too.
For that matter, at the moment I am too damn busy. Having a boyfriend was good for me; I flopped at his house and did my homework. Dating is likely to be quite hard; I don't really have the time to justify anyone's exclusive investment in me until a strong attachment is formed, which might involve guy X simultaneously seeing other women in the interim, until I get to the point where I want to flop at his house, or he says, sorry, I couldn't wait around, and I met someone I like better/who has more time for me.
Maintaining some mutual freedom is just that, so it's really hard for me to swallow the notion that the current idea that you need not be bound to someone if you meet them for coffee and decide you'd like to again sometime in the next two weeks is an outgrowth of a patriarchal order, since by asserting my right to date around, I'm preserving my ability to do what I want to with my body and my time, and denying that I have any particular obligation to someone except the ones that I willingly undertake. There's no inequality there.
The men I had sex with while seeing Graham, btw, both knew about him, although again, since it was quite casual sex with each of them, I feel confident that they wouldn't have felt betrayed had they not known, then found out. In one case the guy did make a little effort to tempt me away, and tried emailing me a couple months later, but he didn't succeed, and under all of the circumstances, I'm sure he sucked it up well.
Part of this conversation that seems missing is D-squared's idea that "wooing" a woman who isn't exclusive to you is expensive for the man. Everyone on this thread who's expressed some sympathy for the parallel dating idea has--I think--also rejected the convention that the man should pay for dates.
I don't think this is a non sequitor; if the man and the woman are equal when they go out to do something fun together, equal when they decide whether or not they want to fuck, and equal in their level of declared committment, then they can decide later on how obligated they want to feel towards each other.
okay, as a former Bostonian-New Yorker hybrid, I share Tia's norms... and so does most everyone I know who's my age and single.
For personality reasons, I probably couldn't go on more than 3 dates with someone before deep-sixing other dating activity, and certainly no sleeping with more than one person for me, but if we haven't talked about not dating other people then I know I can't assume they're not, and can't get upset - one has to have the conversation first. Or make it very clear in other indirect ways. IME of dating, when it rains it usually pours, so it's not that strange to have dates with a few different men over the same period when you're between relationships.
and Matt, well, some of us find the British system odd because how can you have (good) sex with someone without being sure first whether or not you actually like them as a person, or have a rapport? I have a couple of American friends who've done MPhils or second BAs or both in the UK and they very comically described learning how to play dodge 'em because guys you would never dream of sleeping with seemed convinced you were ready to pop in bed with them at the drop of a hat... on the slightest pretext...
Everyone on this thread who's expressed some sympathy for the parallel dating idea has--I think--also rejected the convention that the man should pay for dates.
I don't think it's a non sequitur, but, not so much of the people in this thread, but in my impression of parallel-dating in general, I think it's more of a man-pays, man-pursues world. And that, not so much anything Tia's said, but my real-world impression, is what I find vaguely offputting about it.
If what we're talking about is a 'man expresses clear sexual interest by paying for a date, woman dates several such men while choosing among (or choosing a number of) suitors' the whole thing seems sort of commidified -- uncomfortably close to 'Don't order the lobster unless you're going to have sex with the guy'.
But none of this has any particular relationship to Tia's described norms or practices.
okay, i'm completely in agreement with tia's 116 (which popped up before my comment). it's about maintaining mutual freedom until emotions get clearer.
also 74 terrifies me since i've got several treasured male friends from college. so far, their brides from "outside the tribe" don't seem thin-skinned, thank GOD.
Huh. In my experience, it's more: we went out, we paid for ourselves, we had sex, but now it's the next day, I'm still essentially single, and I'm going to do as I please until we have a talk about that.
I was there for the most of the second half of the go-go 90s. And I might be confused about something. I think lots of people go on a series of initial dates at the same time. If that's the norm Tia was talking about, I'm on her side. I was thinking more of sex, where, in my circle, if you were having sex with someone, you'd expect it to be monogomous unless otherwise indicated.
Again, I'm hidebound. But the hidebound are legion, even in NYC.
It might be generational; I'm about LB's age. I think the rest of you lot are early to mid 20s. That's close to a decade, and y'all grew up in the shadow of the mighty Clenis.
re: parallel dating. I'd certainly not want to come across as trying to enforce some kind of moralistic code here, and I don't see the problem if everyone understands the rules and if the 'commodification' element is dealt with through strict parity between the sexes in terms of who holds the decision-making power and who pays.
However, it's certainly the case that that practice would not be seen as acceptable in my social circle and I'm fairly confident, although I can't speak with total certainty, among British people in general. It's just not how things work.
My problem with US dating practice is much more that it seems too much like 'shopping' for potential partners and, on a metaphorical level, an incredibly restrictive and 'capitalistic' process in a way that seems alien to the much more random and less rigid way that things generally seem to work here.
I know New Yorkers who date a lot, I know New Yorkers who don't. I'd say the difference is that people who rate themselves as relatively attractive, and are, in some self-conscious way "on the market," date a lot, and have overlapping partners; people who think of themselves as odd or geeky or shy or particularly hopeless romantics, do not. Does that resolve the problem of norms?
It's not a question of one's objective attractiveness, either, but of some internal designation, or notion of self.
That's weird, ac, and maybe true. The friends I have who date many people at a time are the kind who define their self-worth through other people's responses to their looks. Those that don't overlap dates tend to be the kind who don't list "attractive" as their most important quality.
Yeah, I wonder about that--if there's some inverse relationship between consciously thinking about your attractiveness all the time and being dependent on the judgment of others. I had a friend who was approached in the supermarket by a well-known director who wanted to put her in a film, just based on her looks. To me it sounded as though he had no intention of actually casting her, and simply wanted to spend some time on the casting couch. Her head was completely turned by the gesture, however, and it took her forever to come around to my point of view, which turned out to be the correct one. I was surprised that she was so gullible. She is very pretty, but I had assumed she had some knowledge of this separate from horny directors telling her so in supermarkets.
It makes a certain amount of sense. If you particularly value your attractiveness, you want some reward for it, if only to confirm the consistently high value of that attractiveness. Similarly, if you particularly value your intelligence, you probably want approbation, either in school, at work, or on strange philosophy-tinged cock joke blogs, for your smart comments.
I just mean the whole discussion (about serial vs. parallel dating), and then the suggestion that this has to do with how important being attractive is to people. It's all pretty foreign to my experience and I'm learning a lot. That's all.
Ah ok. Makes sense. I was just surprised to see it where it was I guess because 133 was one of the first comments in a while on this thread that I feel like I can connect with emotionally -- the whole dating thing is really pretty far outside my experience (enough so to seem otherworldly) but that thing about the daters doing it for validation of their prettiness put it in a context I could begin to grok.
Yeah, it was actually a comment I had been thinking about making for a while, but by the time I got around to it it wasn't quite apropos of where the thread was.
It's unfamiliar to me for what is I guess the opposite reason: I've been single for a long time, and I'm never really sure how to do the dating thing or even if it's the right way to approach things in my circumstances (probably not). So I don't really have any insight into issues like this, but I do appreciate all the discussion and have learned a lot.
I'm with SCMT in 124. I think it's perfectly appropriate to date in parallel initially, i.e. go out on dates with more than one person. In fact, I think it's healthy, because otherwise I'm likely to obsess about the other person. But, personally, I'm not interested in having sex outside of a monogomous relationship.
And I guess that I'm atotal prude, because unless I already knew the guy through friends, I probably wouldn't invite him in or go up to his apartment to make out on the first date. And I don't think that I'd be ready to sleep with someone on the third date. Maybe by the 5th. I guess that I'm stereotypically girly about this in the saving your fruit sort of way, but actually I don't think it's that. I think that intimacy makes me feel really vulnerable, and I want the degree of physical intimacy to be in sync with the emotional intimacy.
Even in Britain, I don't think that McGrattan's system is universally applicable. I went out on a few dates with an English guy. I wasn't terribly interested in him, but spliiting the dinner check seemed to make him uncmfortable. He also took me to see a play, and he bought the tickets. Of course, I had to take a bus to get into London so that may have been why he felt that it was appropriate for him to shoulder more of the costs.
Where is text when I need him to back me up on this? I believe that ogged takes sex seriously too.
there is a gendering filter going on here too, I think. As a guy, Matt, you probably do the initiating of things much more often, so you can choose when something begins, and you wouldn't initiate things with more than one person at a time.
As a woman, people sometimes initiate things with me -- and that can overlap. How would these hapless men know if anyone else had asked me out to dinner the day before? and why shouldn't i go out with both, if i don't know them as well as i'd like yet? hence parallel dating.
people chose between romantic partners before the dread days of capitalism too.
Perhaps, although actually I've generally not been in the habit of initiating things. In the past I'd struggle to think, apart form a couple of occasions, _who_ initiated things, they just happened.
Of course people chose partners in the past, people still choose partners now. My point is just that things do seem different here (the UK) from there (the US) and what's different is the manner of the choosing, iyswim. Of course these are crude generalisations, and I'm sure they're nothing more than that, <platitude> every individual is different< /platitude >, etc.
And seriously, if I asked someone out -- for anything more than just a cup of coffee or a beer -- and they agreed and they also agreed to go out with someone else then I'd be offended. It's rude. As I said above, it's like talking to someone at a party whose constantly looking over your shoulder in case someone more glamourous or interesting turns up. It also implies that your time -- I don't mean you personally, obviously, it's the impersonal 'you' -- is so valuable to you that you'd rather not wait a few days before accepting the other date invitation.
Now if, as lots of commentators have said above, the norm is different in the US then that's maybe something that I'd just have to get used to and perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd been brought up in that dating culture but from my socio-cultural perspective it's rude.
That rudeness has nothing to do with any gender-based possessiveness -- as I think I've indicated there's a fair bit of casual beer-mediated physical intimacy here and I don't see that remotely as a problem -- but rather it's a matter of really not rating other people that highly and rating yourself (impersonal 'you' again) and your time rather more highly.
[I'm a bit uncomfortable with coming over as hectoring here... I'm more mystified by US dating culture than I am offended by it]
Close textual analysis of the title of this post suggests Apostrophical origins.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 9:43 AM
Though he doesn't capitalize words after the first.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 9:44 AM
I don't know about this. At least in New York, I think it's totally acceptable to have sex with someone you just like.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 9:48 AM
Americans are all hung-up puritans. But Britons are all slappers. So.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 9:51 AM
And I don't actually understand what's supposed to be so pathological about American dating. We go to the movies a couple of times, then have sex? That's supposed to be ass-backwards? Why?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 9:52 AM
Well, I said it was untidy. It's hard to talk about subtle things without making them sound more definite than they are, but I'm not sure about "totally acceptable". It's not so much that people will think you're a bad person for it, or will give you a hard time over it, but IME, it's kind of Not the Done Thing. Someone who's having sex with friends more often than very, very, very occasionally is falling into a particular role, of the racy, promiscuous sexual free spirit, and even if it's not a role that's heavily penalized, it's not one that most people see themselves in.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 9:53 AM
Lizardbreath, that seems plausible to me.
It's also worth noting that I think that youngish British people, increasingly, no longer relate to each in terms of quite the same gender roles that Americans do. Americans, seem much more old fashioned in many respects. The idea that a whole group of friends and various strangers and acquaintances, of both sexes, would just go out and get drunk together regularly, and that sometimes they'd cop off with each other and that if it wasn't a totally unpleasant experience they might, you know, do it again, and then if that wasn't totally horrible they might progress to doing 'date-like' things together, just doesn't seem to gel with those more formalised gender roles.
(Obviously my experience is obviously coloured by the fact that most Americans I meet are university educated, middle-class and over here so I don't intend it to be a totally blanket statement about all citizens of the US.)
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 9:55 AM
I think it's more to do with the rise of male-female friendships and the collapse of dating.
When I was in college, like most young women I knew, I had many male friends, and we were just friends. We'd go out to dinner, movies, even dorm dances sometimes, and there was no sense at all that we were dating. Dating would have meant we were at least thinking about having sex, and these were just friendships. We had plenty of flirting, but if people were a couple, they were probably doing the same things with groups of friends, just sleeping together at the end of the night.
But to my mom, all these fun Fridays and dances were evidence of a healthy casual dating life. I had lots of dates in college!
So I think that's part of it. Since male-female social contact isn't automatically teh sex0r any more (I leave that in for you, Weiner), the only way to distinguish romantic interest from just friends is having sex.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:00 AM
Maybe I'm hopelessly prudish and American, but I rather prefer our way. I would way rather stay mostly sober, deal with one person, have all the tingly excitement of dressing up, making eyes at each other, tension building throughout the evening, maybe make out on a park bench, and then have teh sex to look forward to, and be sober when I had it, than just get plastered and have a fifty fifty chance of having to give the "it happens to everyone" speech because my evening companion had a six shots of vodka.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:00 AM
We go to the movies a couple of times, then have sex? That's supposed to be ass-backwards? Why?
It's that we're all (I include myself from my single days) so bent out of shape over finding someone to go to the movies with. We're not comfortable with the British system described by McGrattan (screw around with your friends and see what sticks), but we're also not comfortable with the making-romantic-advances to people we don't know well that you have to do to make the three-movie-dates-then-sex thing work.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:01 AM
Is this not also tied up with the habit of American women to be "dating" (in the sense of not having sex with but regularly going out with, and all right, sometimes having sex with) several men at once? To an outsider, this looks really, really weird and not a little bit screwed up.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:01 AM
I'm comparatively racy, but if there one thing I wouldn't do, it's go out drinking with a group of friends and wind up in bed with one of them. That scenario is public in a way that makes me uncomfortable.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:02 AM
a whole group of friends and various strangers and acquaintances, of both sexes, would just go out and get drunk together regularly, and that sometimes they'd cop off with each other and that if it wasn't a totally unpleasant experience they might, you know, do it again, and then if that wasn't totally horrible they might progress to doing 'date-like' things together
See, this is what I thought single people did these days in the US. Can one of the twentysomethings here enlighten me?
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:03 AM
This isn't so much a habit I'm familiar with, or not as a nationwide trend. Serial monogamy is still pretty standard here in the States.
(Where'd you get this from? Old girlfriend who was American? Because if that's the case, she was just spinning you a story: "No, honestly, D., everyone in the US dates several men at the same time. I just assumed you knew!")
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:04 AM
3: I had mixed experiences. Often the guys I went out with who said they were just into something fun, not long-term, were really actually totally obsessed with finding teh one, but had recently gone through a bad breakup or whatever. I had a few experiences in which sleeping with someone totally great and wonderful and fun was followed by an email saying "That was so wonderful it reminded me of why I really loved being in a relationship. Since you're not into that, I'm getting back together with my ex. Thank you!"
That, to me, seems psychotic. The worst, though, is when you sleep with a guy and afterward, he says, "I can tell you are feeling something here, and I am too, so I think we should break it off." Actually, I might have been feeling "fun," but don't project your lovey feelings onto me.
I guess I always blamed it on a sort of patriarchal obsession with ownership. "I have fucked this girl and now must either control her every movement or let her go, and since controlling her is wrong, she must be set free." But maybe it's an American thing.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:05 AM
Is this not also tied up with the habit of American women to be "dating" (in the sense of not having sex with but regularly going out with, and all right, sometimes having sex with) several men at once? To an outsider, this looks really, really weird and not a little bit screwed up.
I think this is evidence against LB's theory, for here is a Briton lecturing us about our promiscuity. Why can't one go around with more than one person at once, and have sex with some of them?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:05 AM
14 to 11.
To 13: not that it doesn't happen, but it's not something people feel particularly positive about.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:06 AM
I think this is evidence against LB's theory, for here is a Briton lecturing us about our promiscuity. Why can't one go around with more than one person at once, and have sex with some of them?
Yeah, really; step off, Queen Victoria.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:07 AM
I think I agree with Tia; I know what you're saying in your "double-bind" paragraph, but I disagree about the consequences. I seldom went after sex without serious romantic intent, but quite often found it couldn't be sustained or wouldn't work. No harm/no foul. And I was ok when my intent was more serious than hers.
I'd choose a different adjective for my dressing-up excitment, though, even if hers is both accurate and precise.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:09 AM
a friend rather than a girlfriend, who was in the habit of telling me about her sex life whether I asked or not (OK I admit it; I asked).
What seemed weird is that she believed herself to be serial-monogamist, but was "just seeing, as friends", two or three chaps at a time, then she would have sex with one of them and that would start a "relationship". Which would then end and another two or three suitors would show up. I suppose it was a sort of early version of "Pop Idol".
She had female friends who didn't think she was weird or unsavoury so I assumed (and assume) it was normal. I tended to feel sorry for the underdogs, who appeared to have been entering a quite expensive and inconvenient auditioning process.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:11 AM
Half of my friends think it's reasonable to sleep with several guys at once, with or without telling the other, as long as there's no "commitment" in any of them. But I was pretty shocked (not mad) when I found out a guy I'd slept with and who intended to keep sleeping with me fooled around with another girl between our first two dates. I just couldn't handle the stress. I made it a rule never to sleep with more than one guy in any 30-day period, so I'd never be in the bind of saying, "So, either you gave me crabs or I gave them to you." Ugh. (Luckily, this never came up, but you never know.)
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:15 AM
Another thing that might be at work here is that Americans generally aren't able to keep their college network of friends. Everyone moves around too damned much.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:15 AM
20: Yeah, I wouldn't call that typical so much -- there's a lot of space between 'not actively disapproved of' and 'what most people do.'
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:16 AM
ahh I see. I would guess that in UK that kind of thing would be (very very very) actively disapproved of.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:17 AM
quelle tragedie, that a man should spend money or be inconvenienced by a woman who never sleeps with him. They can also be looking around during this process, you know, and are not obligated to spend time with anyone whose company they don't enjoy, and don't have to spend more money than they feel the urge to.
I don't see what's wrong with this scenario at all.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:17 AM
#20:
I've been an underdog, who came to terms with the fact that it meant a lot more to me than to her. The process of accepting that is one of alcohol's great uses. And looking back on it, the fact that it did mean a lot to me is cherishable--not to be regretted.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:18 AM
I should say that I don't think all of the issues described in the post closely constrain what most Americans (college educated urbanites, that is, I can't really generalize much further) actually do, it's more that they create an awful lot of uneasiness and discomfort.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:20 AM
Tia, why don't you go for the nice guys?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:20 AM
I'm not the moralising kind. But it does provide the economic base to the dating pathology that LB identified; if the cost of liking A is giving up the options on B and C, then it is going to be a bigger sunk cost and a bigger decision. This makes the length of the auditioning process longer than it needs to be and wastes a lot more of everyone's time. If you carry out the auditions in series rather than in parallel, then you have a shorter average audition and it becomes possible to combine it with your normal social life (because you don't have to worry about overlaps).
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:21 AM
(of course you knew this was going to come down to a dynamic programming problem; I wouldn't be much of an economist if it didn't!)
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:23 AM
Since it seems to have been passed over and I think it was an excellent point, I'm just going to delurk for a moment and highlight Cala's #8.
And I'd add to it that I think a non-trivial amount of dating gets started that way these days: friends morphing into a relationship, rather than just starting one up cold with a pickup line or setup.
Posted by pyrate | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:26 AM
actually, the causation might work the other way round; if you have a high value on not having sex with someone that you aren't prepared to be in a long-term relationship with, it would make sense to parallelise the search process. Though it still wastes a lot of time.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:26 AM
It occurs to me that I have been completely serial. That is, the sequence has always been AAA, BBB, CCC. There has never been a BA or CA or YA or any other out-of-order sequence. I guess that's an indicator of seriousness. Am I an outlier?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:27 AM
Well, and it's a conflict of basic assumptions. Your friend, and Tia, look to be working with this:
A culture where casual romance (non-serious, flirty dating, with no necessary implication that sex was on the cards) was more normal could work with the American reserve around having sex.
Which is I suppose a functional system, although I can't say that I like it much myself; it's got that whole 'woman retaining her virtue until the value of the wooing gets good enough' thing going on which strikes me as incompatible with treating people equally, and sort of lousy for both parties. But even if it's functional when everyone knows how it works, it's going to confuse the heck out of someone who isn't expecting it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:27 AM
It's the fact that it's an auditioning process at all that seems alien to me. I just really don't know many people who go about things that way.
It's the quasi-formality of the process and the element of stress/tension in deciding if this person is going to be a 'good' person for you and then using that decision to base the further decision whether to get physically intimate that's really quite unlike how most people I know go about things.
That's the sort of process that people I know go through before they *move in* together, not before they have a semi-drunken snog or spend the night together.
Now I realise that the nature of teh internet and the ease with which everyone can get all verbal and analytic probably exaggerates the real differences in dating behaviour on both sides of the Atlantic, but there's no question that there really are substantial differences.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:28 AM
34 to 29, and I suppose also to 32.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:29 AM
If I'm interested in seeing or fucking A, but I'm not convinced A should be should be my boyfriend, or he's not convinced I should be his girlfriend, then I might like to check out B or C while continuing to enjoy the company, in whatever respect, of A. For example, when I started going out with Graham he didn't want to be exclusive because he wanted to look for someone his age and marriageable, but we were still interested in fucking. Meanwhile, he went out with another woman we called 39, for her age, and I had sex with a coupla other guys (for inclusive definitions of sex) both of whom were seriously disadvantaged by my burgeoning attachment to Graham, but I am not crying tears of blood for them. Parallel auditions let you maintain a relationship with someone you want to see casually while keeping your eye open for the something that may be permanent.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:29 AM
I've been an underdog, who came to terms with the fact that it meant a lot more to me than to her. The process of accepting that is one of alcohol's great uses. And looking back on it, the fact that it did mean a lot to me is cherishable--not to be regretted.
Absolutely (except the alcohol part--maybe that's where I have gone wrong, not enough alcohol).
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:29 AM
I'd guess dating is weird and awkward in most or all countries. Not that I have any idea, really.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:30 AM
If you carry out the auditions in series rather than in parallel, then you have a shorter average audition
Another argument for speed-dating.
Posted by Teh Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:30 AM
re: 34 - Yes, that approach does seem incompatible with genuine equality.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:31 AM
This thread highlights a good reason why the French, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Austrians etc. look accross The Channel and then further accross the Atlantic and realise that they understand neither of the cultures they see.
Maybe it is smugness, but the friends and colleagues with whom I have spoken about such matters here universally claim that Central Europeans are just more relaxed about sexual matters that the americans, without going sofar to debase the currency as the Brits. This is a summary of their words, not mine BTW.
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:32 AM
when I started going out with Graham he didn't want to be exclusive because he wanted to look for someone his age and marriageable, but we were still interested in fucking. Meanwhile, he went out with another woman we called 39, for her age, and I had sex with a coupla other guys
christ on a bike. I can't even organise a regular chess match.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:33 AM
re: 42
I'm married to a Czech -- in my experience the Central Europeans are much like the British although there's less alcohol involved.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:34 AM
WWMDD? (What would Maureen Dowd do?) Come to think of it, I don't know what her age/income bracket would do.
Posted by bill | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:34 AM
42: I vote for smugness.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:36 AM
34: Neither I nor, as far as I can glean, dsquared's friend are working with that assumption. I'm not "retaining my virtue" when I even do wait a bit to sleep with someone, it's more an interest in the buildup of tension, and an occasional need for strong mutual rapport to precede sex. I don't always need that rapport, because sometimes there's an immediate physical attraction that takes care of business, but sometimes the issue is more confusing--I have to go home and think "he's not exactly my type, but I feel fluttery, and I couldn't eat my food," and maybe then I'm still not ready, and I need some time before my attraction really flowers and I'm enthusiastic about sex.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:36 AM
44: Check on the alcohol.
I'm totally open to persuasion on the other elements though.
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:37 AM
it's going to confuse the heck out of someone who isn't expecting it.
Maybe this gets to the root of the problem. It's not that any particular set of "rules" for dating and sex are bad, it's that for whatever reason we are in a period where the rules are in such flux that it's hard to know what things mean or how to react. Does the sex mean full on romance or does it mean an itch had to be scratched?
There are times when being an old married guy is very good. I have enough problems without having to worry about this stuff.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:37 AM
Re 43: My French friends were often quite shocked at the casual sexual behavior of my English friends, for what that's worth.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:37 AM
42,46:
Yeah, it therefore hardly seems aggressive or rude, given how relaxed they are and all, to suggest that they know what they can do with themselves.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:39 AM
There are times when being an old married guy is very good. I have enough problems without having to worry about this stuff.
Likewise. I could never manage dating successfully back when I was a fetching young single thing -- it's nice being out of the game.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:39 AM
Tia: Parallel auditions let you maintain a relationship with someone you want to see casually while keeping your eye open for the something that may be permanent.
nicely illustrates LB's point: But even if it's functional when everyone knows how it works, it's going to confuse the heck out of someone who isn't expecting it.
Also: someone said upthread everything is an opportunity cost. In Tia's scenario, it would seem as though if everyone knows the rules, it's all fine. Except that not everybody agrees, at least on a personal level. Some people might mentally write off anyone they come across who is in any sort of relationship -- so that even if Tia is keeping her eyes open for the "something permanent", some of that pool are weeding themselves out because they don't want to come in even on the tail end of an existing relationship (however casual).
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:40 AM
It's not that complicated. The relationship is either committed, or it is not. You establish this verbally. You then proceed to do what you feel like until you have a relationship that is committed.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:41 AM
I need some time before my attraction really flowers
If only I'd have a quid for every time someone said that to me ...
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:41 AM
I also think one should be vary of having too categorical opinions of how dating works in your country; even in your own class and age bracket, you'll here a lot of different answers.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:44 AM
I idly wonder what it would be like if you could establish a parallel "not committed" relationship with an employer, and conclude it might be quite fun. Although less so if your employer could establish a parallel, not committed relationship with you.
I also suspect that the fact that women have much less unrealistic self-images than men and thus deal with the occasional setbacks a lot easier, combined with parallel auditioning, might help explain some of the more horrific misogyny one finds on the Yank bits of the Internet.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:44 AM
Tia-- I think all Witt meant is that even if there is full disclosure, you're still not going to have a chance to date anyone who isn't comfortable with overlapping non-committed relationships.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:45 AM
re: 54
That's not, in my experience, how things work here in the UK at all. I think that's what dsquared alluded to above.
If you're seeing someone -- i.e. you've actually gone out together at least once -- the assumption is that you won't be looking for someone else until you've explicitly agreed that you are no longer seeing one another. In fact, people would be pretty bloody pissed off if you were looking around for someone else. It's rude -- it's like being at a party and talking to someone and realising they are looking over your shoulder all the time just in case someone more interesting has turned up.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:46 AM
parallel "not committed" relationship with an employer, and conclude it might be quite fun.
Freelancing?
if your employer could establish a parallel, not committed relationship with you.
At-will employment?
These are both pretty standard, aren't they?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:47 AM
57 is right about a big source of misogyny, I think.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:48 AM
More like "moonlighting" in the one case; you're working with other employers. And more like internships in the other case; the employer's testing you out against a couple of others. Both legal I suppose but not generally regarded as the greatest thing.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:49 AM
58 is right. Thanks, LB.
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:49 AM
That's not my experience on how dating works in the U.S. If you're going on an acknowledged date, you're not looking until you've made it explicit to the other person. Because of the whole 'it's a date, there's a presumption of sex' thing.
But my experience is mostly that people hang out in groups of friends until two people starting hitting it off more, then they start sleeping together, and so there's a fair level of knowing each other well before deciding to date.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:51 AM
Yeah, Cala reminds me, "dating" sucks.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:53 AM
64 sounds 'normal' to me :-)
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:55 AM
57 -- are employment relationships not many-to-many? It seems to me employers can employ more than one employee simultaneously, and that employees can work for more than one employer simultaneously, if the latter is not as universal as the former. Am I misreading your post?
Posted by Teh Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:56 AM
Oh nemmine -- I see my question was already asked and answered.
Posted by Teh Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 10:59 AM
57: Well, a source and a result of misogyny, or at least of an expectation that men are going to be misogynist.
Part of what plays into all this is an expectation (which is, I should say, fundamentally bullshit as it applies to most actual men I know, but the idea that men generally behave this way still affects people) that men and women approach each other with basically different goals -- that men want sex but essentially kind of dislike women and would prefer to get sex without having to form relationships or associate with women much at all.
Under this assumption, the parallel dating thing makes more sense -- given that the man is assumed to be assiduously avoiding any kind of attachment until it is explicitly agreed upon, because men really dislike attachment, it's no injury to him to be looking around for other partners. (And given that the woman knows that men prefer to be unattached, her expectations are the same.)
Now this assumption is basically crap -- most men seem to want warmth and emotional connection and all that about as much as most women do (i.e., usually, but not necessarily always), but I think people believe it, and it makes the dating process a little more hostile and uncomfortable.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:06 AM
But my experience is mostly that people hang out in groups of friends until two people starting hitting it off more, then they start sleeping together, and so there's a fair level of knowing each other well before deciding to date.
And I think this is largely true, just that people get much more wrecked about the process than necessary.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:07 AM
To Cala's 64 I'll add that friends play a disproportionate role in (20-something, postundergrad) American sexual psychoses. The urban tribe serves not only to introduce you to potential mates (including members of the tribe, i.e., close friends) but also vets them to a certain degree. If your social scene is organized around a relatively focused nucleus of friendships, you may choose to casually see or sleep with some people, but preserve for the slot of significant dating status someone you can integrate into your larger life. But the tendency of the urban tribe is to know and gossip about the romantic interests in its members' lives, contributing to a division of dating tiers. Some dating is for fun, some dating is actually a part of my life.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:08 AM
re: 69
This seems right in all respects.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:12 AM
I was just thinking back on how Armsmasher ended up with his smashing pseudonym. It lead me to ask, where is Tripp?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:13 AM
70,71: IME the neuroses really set in when a) someone doesn't find their One True Love Ž (or even a decent longish fling) within the group, and b) someone who was in the non-tribe group now has to become part of the tribe without knowing any of the smoke signals, and c) just say, it's a good friend from college and the new non-tribe bride is really uncomfortable that he has a close female friend who is reasonably attractive, has known him years longer than the bride has and they've never acknowledged sleeping together. Hilarity ensues.
Moral: Sleep with all your friends so you can say, "Well, we thought we'd be an item, but that was over five years ago. Congrats!" instead of "No, really, there's just never been any attraction between X and me. Really."
???
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:15 AM
54 was in fact, to 43, but to Witt I will say that in my circles, my understanding is universally held. I have never had any confusion about this ever arise.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:17 AM
But Tia, you must acknowledge that your experience is unique. Confusion is sex, so they say.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:21 AM
My experience is unique, but you always have to learn new rules when you get to a new culture, and New York's are fairly well-understood among everyone I know.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:27 AM
I don't understand 54, Tia. Of course it's complicated, New York or no; it's not as if there is only trans-Atlantic misunderstandings about what people are doing when they're dating. I doubt that dating is as clearcut as your anecdotal experience indicates for even the majority of single people living in the city, and scores of literature testifies to that. Also, I don't see that dating (in practice, not on paper) often works out as binary as you claim. And furthermore, I don't believe that expectations in NYC are so fundamentally different from those of other major urban metropolitan areas in the States that you can claim, "Well, here on the Island, we do things differently. . . ."
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:35 AM
What happened to the awesome story you promised us yesterday, 'Smasher?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:36 AM
77: Um, also a New Yorker here. My basic dating assumption would be exclusive unless very, very, clearly stated otherwise, and I'd be surprised and put off by such a statement (not necessarily irretrievably put off, but put off). So, even within NY college educated middle class circles, there's room for confusion.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:37 AM
So, LB, if you went on a Nerve date, and the next week you met a guy at the bookstore who asked you out to dinner and movie, you'd say, we have to keep it friendly; I have a boyfriend?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:40 AM
I'd say that I was doing online dating, and was thinking about seeing a particular guy again. If I liked the Nerve guy enough to have made plans for a second date with him, I probably wouldn't go out with bookstore guy -- I'd put it off until I'd decided against Mr. Nerve.
Not that there's anything wrong with the alternative, it just wouldn't be my default assumption.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:47 AM
I'm with Tia on this.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:48 AM
I'm theoretically on Tia's side here, but in practice, by the end of a first date I've already slept with the guy or decided I don't want to--which tilts the calculation in favor of disclosure and non-parallel dating.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:52 AM
OT, but speaking of the origins of my pseudonym:
I'm writing an article about an art consultant who works in DC. For the profile she invited me to a PR-ish event she was hosting for an artist from NYC ("Debbie") whose parents live in DC. Consultant is being retained to help facilitate this artist's career or some such.
Debbie is a painter with less than a year's experience paitning, but her mother ("Kelly") is determined to debut her and wants to start in DC where she has connections. So Kelly treats a party of 20 people to a three-course meal at one of the finest restaurants in DC. It's truly absurd, the inverse proportion between mother's milk and daughter's talent, but so it goes.
Anyway, I'm seated at dinner beside Kelly, who, it turns out, is a man presenting as a woman. I've never talked with a transsexual in any real length, so I suppose this is an enlightening dinner for me. And she spends a great deal of dinner talking about herself, too. She's a Republican (which genuinely shocked me). She's a life coach and former Feng Shui consultant, and that all seems perfect. Thenthen!when Kelly changes the subject from her person to me, she proceeds to mock me for having a girl's name!
Strong urge to quip, "Funny that we both have girls' names!" and I think she kind of earned it, but I didn't go there.
Posted by Normsmasher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:53 AM
If I were actually doing online dating, which I never have (it's funny, it doesn't feel as though I've been together with Buck all that long, but I haven't been single since 1995. Online dating was much less mainstream then.) I'd probably be more likely to parallel date, at least if everyone involved was also online -- they'd all know what was going on. My assumptions are based on dating personal friends and acquaintances.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:55 AM
Nevertheless, I maintain that it is widely understood here that there is a difference between "dating" and "a committed relationship." The very existence of that adjective implies that there is an alternatively uncommitted relationship. A not insignificant amount of pop cultural ink has been spilled on making the move to seeing someone exclusively. You'll hear people ask all the time, "are you exclusive?" You're a New Yorker, true, but my experience so heavily weighs on the side of a shared assumption that relationships in which emotional intimacy is yet to be established are not assumed to be exclusive; it is not, in any sense, cheating to go out with someone else that it would take more than you to convince me that this isn't really a shared paradigm.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:55 AM
I apologize for the punctuation in that last sentence.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 11:57 AM
In college we always just got drunk and had sex with whoever was closest. Dating was something that happened to other people, and even dating started with drunken sex. Sober sex was only for relationships of three weeks or more, which was a positive eon in our terms.
I have never had a 'normal' date in my life. All of this angst miraculously passed me by, for which I thank vodka.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:01 PM
Well, I've got Armsmasher who seems to agree that your paradigm is not universal, and I do have a social circle of people who date roughly according to my expectations (not that I don't know anyone who parallel-dates, but certainly not everyone expects it). I'm just saying that there's room for confusion, unless everything is made quite explicit.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:02 PM
I have never had a 'normal' date in my life. All of this angst miraculously passed me by, for which I thank vodka.
I believe I had the worst of both worlds. How I envy all the rest of you.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:03 PM
My experience about dating norms comports with LBs. I admit that I'm pretty hidebound. It's not that I think parallel dating is bad or inappropriate or anything; it would just be confusing to me - I couldn't sort out all my motivations. So, at a minimum, serial dating only for the stupid!
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:03 PM
I tend to agree with LB about the pathology. Part of this is personal hangups, but for a long time I was really pretty weird about dating because I thought it was somehow wrong to be with someone who I wasn't at least thinking about being with Forevah. This meant that I didn't pursue people very often, when it did it was a Huge Deal, and I had very little skillz at recognizing interest, getting people interested, breathing regularly enough around an interest to talk coherently, etc. So it was a terrible double bind of the kind LB describes.
I would be aware that friends of mine were hooking up, but I couldn't imagine trying to hook up with a friend, both because I couldn't recognize signals (it is possible that they weren't being sent) and because I thought that trying to make a move on a friend and being rejected would make things incredibly awkward in the future. Oddly enough, once I did start asking people out more, I became really good at staying friends with women I'd dated or tried to date.
For sure I had an extreme case of what's being discussed, but I know the feeling. (And FWIW wasn't brought up in a puritanical religion or a particularly conservative area.)
Posted by Ttam R. | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:05 PM
Yeah, I just think there's endless room for confusion, especially given that two people can always walk away from an evening with very different interpretations of what happened. Also, the transition from casual to exclusive is gradual and involves stages, so it leaves room for further crossed signals and misinterpretations.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:06 PM
I overhyped it as the awesomest story, Becks, but I found myself thinking during the event that I wished the Mineshaft were with me.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:10 PM
I don't claim my paradigm is universal; I claim that it is shared, here. I have no idea whether "the island" has any claim to uniqueness, but I've lived most of my dating life here, so I'm limiting myself to what I know. I also don't claim that it's never the case that some people might prefer serial dating and might come to such arrangements with their partners, but that people don't by default expect, of a random person they meet and go out with once, a commitment. People who have such expectations are a small minority here, and I know none of them personally, except LB, I guess.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:10 PM
people don't by default expect, of a random person they meet and go out with once, a commitment
I don't think that's what Witt was saying in 53, though.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:14 PM
Or dsquared, to whom the point was originally put. Point being, I don't think that was the original point being refuted.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:16 PM
Witt was saying in the first half of his post that people who didn't know how it worked would be confused. I counter: IME, people know how it works. A noob will quickly learn not to get his/her heart broken because someone (s)he saw once or twice is also still thinking of others.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:18 PM
to 96:
I did say that "My assumptions are based on dating personal friends and acquaintances." I'd probably have expectations closer to yours if I were more accustomed to dating strangers and near strangers (as with online dating). I think I'd still expect either exclusivity or full, explicit disclosure by the time any given dating partner had made it to the level of acquaintance.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:19 PM
I wished the Mineshaft were with me.
Now, that's what we need: portability.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:21 PM
Yeah, Tia, unless you're a lot more active than I would reasonably expect any human being to be, I'm not sure you can claim to have the definitive canvass of NYC opinions. I spent a few years in NYC - just after time LB started with Buck, damnit! - and most people in my circle would acknowledge your conventions, but I'm unaware of any that lived by them. It seems entirely probable that there is a set of hidebound people in Manhattan that is sufficiently large as to allow them to think those conventions (that is, mine) are the norm.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:23 PM
SCMT, you're conceding my point: people can be in practice serial daters; hardly anyone expects it by default.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:24 PM
I will also confess to being a little weirded out by the idea of dating more than one person and trying to decide between them. And I don't think this is exclusive to online dating. One of my friends once mentioned that she'd been on four dates this week, and I said, "Oh, online dating?" (which I think she'd been contemplating) and she was annoyed that I didn't think she could get four dates in one week without electronic assistance. I understand why it's a good idea but I think I myself might be incapable of thinking of more than one person as potential dates at once. Or, what SCMT said in 92.
Posted by Ttam R. | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:24 PM
I'm getting moderately uncomfortable here because I feel as though it sounds as if I'm trying to enforce a code of sexual morality, or saying something rude about Tia's expectations and I'm really not trying to do either (well, I have said something moderately rude, in that I think this sort of parallel dating may not be easily compatible with what I think of as treating people equally. But I don't mean to say anything ruder than that.).
I'm just saying that I would be honestly surprised if someone I was dating at all was seeing someone else, and I'd be offended if it hadn't been disclosed. I'm aware that that's not an entirely unconventional way to behave, and that plenty of people do, but it's not, IME and IM social circles, a default assumption.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:31 PM
SCMT, you're conceding my point: people can be in practice serial daters; hardly anyone expects it by default.
Sorry, I wrote badly. I meant that people in my circle acknowledged that there were people who had your norms and that there was nothing inappropriate about those norms. But most of them, I think, assumed that there was a self-sorting process that meant that people they hung out with, and then dated, shared their (my) norms. That is, we assumed that the people we were meeting up with and dating were serial daters. There was certainly room for slight overlap, but less for interweaving dating in parallel. We'd all have felt pretty obliged to have a this is not exclusive conversation rather than the reverse.
I'm not sure that's much clearer. I'm not sure how important it is, either, as I do think self-selection takes care of a lot of this. It's entirely believable that I could move about in one group with one set of norms, and you in another, and neither of us would run into people with the other set of norms much.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:31 PM
A good friend of mine dates more than one guy at a time without a shred of bad conscience about it. She lives in LA. Her argument is that "It's none of their business what I'm doing when I'm not with them until there's some agreement that it is their business."
I think the important qualifier is that she's not expecting any of those dates to evolve into something more serious. She's *not* "deciding between them." It could be argued that she's "sleeping around," except that she has good fun with these guys, they're nice to each other, and she's open to the vague possibility that she might meet someone she'll become more serious about.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:33 PM
105 -- get with the program, Granny -- the times they are a-changin'.
Posted by Teh Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:43 PM
Let me jump in and also apologize for being rude; that also wasn't my intention. I think Tia's code holds in my urban tribe, or would if we were going on dates more often, so I didn't intend to levy judgment about her approach.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:44 PM
I'm aware that that's not an entirely unconventional way to behave, and that plenty of people do, but it's not, IME and IM social circles, a default assumption.
I think the problem is really only that people are assuming that their norms are the, well, normal norms, and that's rarely true, and that must be kept in mind.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:44 PM
Re LB, and Smasher, I hope it's clear I don't think there's anything wrong with Tia's norms.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 12:57 PM
I think there are two situations being described here.
Abstract: dating someone once does not establish exclusivity.
Concrete: Tia was dating more than one person (but it's clear, from what we know now, that she was seeing Graham more seriously, if not exclusively, than the other people she's dating).
I'm fine with the abstract, but in the concrete situation, if it were clear that Tia and Graham were not exclusive, but further along, than Tia and I, I'd probably think twice about dating Tia (at that time). Which is to say that if everyone has the same information, you can make your own decisions.
Also, I often find it hard to believe Tia and I went to the same high school.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 1:18 PM
Re: 49: Maybe this gets to the root of the problem. It's not that any particular set of "rules" for dating and sex are bad, it's that for whatever reason we are in a period where the rules are in such flux that it's hard to know what things mean or how to react. Does the sex mean full on romance or does it mean an itch had to be scratched?
No, no, no! All other things being equal, the best set of conventions is the set that maximizes happiness. That set, I think, will tend to maximize guilt-free fucking (without compromising honesty, integrity, etc.). I think Idealist is right that a serious lack of clarity in current norms (as evidenced by the fact that we can't agree what they are) causes a lot of trouble. But not all conventions are created equal, and some will involve much more strain, hypocrisy and masturbation than is strictly necessary.
Posted by Chris | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 2:54 PM
Also, FWIW (I'm a married 32 year old New Yorker with few friends), as far as I can tell Tia's assumptions strike me as quite the norm.
Posted by Chris | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 2:57 PM
114. Ugh. What an ugly sentence. Of course I can tell how they strike me.
OK, back to lurking. I'm humiliated.
Posted by Chris | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 2:58 PM
If SCMT wants to corroborate LB, and attribute his beliefs to his whole social group, then I must have made an overtotalizing claim. (I'd be curious: how many years ago, SCMT?) The reason I brought it up in the first place was to assert that there are environments where these assumptions are shared enough so that it was rarely, if ever, a problem, which I still think is true, since I never encounter anyone who doesn't share my expectations.
As I told LB in email I'd say on the thread:
Which is I suppose a functional system, although I can't say that I like it much myself; it's got that whole 'woman retaining her virtue until the value of the wooing gets good enough' thing going on which strikes me as incompatible with treating people equally, and sort of lousy for both parties.
is wrong.
and so is this:
Part of what plays into all this is an expectation (which is, I should say, fundamentally bullshit as it applies to most actual men I know, but the idea that men generally behave this way still affects people) that men and women approach each other with basically different goals -- that men want sex but essentially kind of dislike women and would prefer to get sex without having to form relationships or associate with women much at all.
I'm never waiting "for the wooing to get good enough"; I'm waiting for a clear feeling of mutual attachment, which doesn't happen right way for everyone in all circumstances, regardless of their sex. I could as easily say that serial dating plays into the expectation that women always fall with their heart, not with their 'nads, that they're never interested in sex with different people, sex for its own sake, etc. The first time I met Graham I was genuinely confused about whether I was attracted to him; he was much older than anyone I'd ever been involved in and he didn't look like my picture of a sexual partner. It was only the fact that I couldn't eat and ripped my bread into little pieces at our dinner that made me think I was attracted to him, because I recognize that as behavior from situations when I'm less ambiguously attracted. (I used to have breakfast with my college boyfriend before we got together, and I took these super stiff gigantic bagels from our dining hall and reduced them to a pile of crumbs while not touching a bite of my food.) I was still confused for a while, but I wanted to continue seeing him. But it certainly wasn't something that I was positive I wanted to pursue, and if someone else had come along, I would have wanted to say "hey" to him too.
For that matter, at the moment I am too damn busy. Having a boyfriend was good for me; I flopped at his house and did my homework. Dating is likely to be quite hard; I don't really have the time to justify anyone's exclusive investment in me until a strong attachment is formed, which might involve guy X simultaneously seeing other women in the interim, until I get to the point where I want to flop at his house, or he says, sorry, I couldn't wait around, and I met someone I like better/who has more time for me.
Maintaining some mutual freedom is just that, so it's really hard for me to swallow the notion that the current idea that you need not be bound to someone if you meet them for coffee and decide you'd like to again sometime in the next two weeks is an outgrowth of a patriarchal order, since by asserting my right to date around, I'm preserving my ability to do what I want to with my body and my time, and denying that I have any particular obligation to someone except the ones that I willingly undertake. There's no inequality there.
The men I had sex with while seeing Graham, btw, both knew about him, although again, since it was quite casual sex with each of them, I feel confident that they wouldn't have felt betrayed had they not known, then found out. In one case the guy did make a little effort to tempt me away, and tried emailing me a couple months later, but he didn't succeed, and under all of the circumstances, I'm sure he sucked it up well.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:02 PM
OK, back to lurking
Nooooooooooo!
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:03 PM
Part of this conversation that seems missing is D-squared's idea that "wooing" a woman who isn't exclusive to you is expensive for the man. Everyone on this thread who's expressed some sympathy for the parallel dating idea has--I think--also rejected the convention that the man should pay for dates.
I don't think this is a non sequitor; if the man and the woman are equal when they go out to do something fun together, equal when they decide whether or not they want to fuck, and equal in their level of declared committment, then they can decide later on how obligated they want to feel towards each other.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:13 PM
"sequitur".
Also, JM's 84 was like a glimpse into an alien world for me.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:25 PM
okay, as a former Bostonian-New Yorker hybrid, I share Tia's norms... and so does most everyone I know who's my age and single.
For personality reasons, I probably couldn't go on more than 3 dates with someone before deep-sixing other dating activity, and certainly no sleeping with more than one person for me, but if we haven't talked about not dating other people then I know I can't assume they're not, and can't get upset - one has to have the conversation first. Or make it very clear in other indirect ways. IME of dating, when it rains it usually pours, so it's not that strange to have dates with a few different men over the same period when you're between relationships.
and Matt, well, some of us find the British system odd because how can you have (good) sex with someone without being sure first whether or not you actually like them as a person, or have a rapport? I have a couple of American friends who've done MPhils or second BAs or both in the UK and they very comically described learning how to play dodge 'em because guys you would never dream of sleeping with seemed convinced you were ready to pop in bed with them at the drop of a hat... on the slightest pretext...
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:25 PM
Everyone on this thread who's expressed some sympathy for the parallel dating idea has--I think--also rejected the convention that the man should pay for dates.
I don't think it's a non sequitur, but, not so much of the people in this thread, but in my impression of parallel-dating in general, I think it's more of a man-pays, man-pursues world. And that, not so much anything Tia's said, but my real-world impression, is what I find vaguely offputting about it.
If what we're talking about is a 'man expresses clear sexual interest by paying for a date, woman dates several such men while choosing among (or choosing a number of) suitors' the whole thing seems sort of commidified -- uncomfortably close to 'Don't order the lobster unless you're going to have sex with the guy'.
But none of this has any particular relationship to Tia's described norms or practices.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:34 PM
okay, i'm completely in agreement with tia's 116 (which popped up before my comment). it's about maintaining mutual freedom until emotions get clearer.
also 74 terrifies me since i've got several treasured male friends from college. so far, their brides from "outside the tribe" don't seem thin-skinned, thank GOD.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:37 PM
Huh. In my experience, it's more: we went out, we paid for ourselves, we had sex, but now it's the next day, I'm still essentially single, and I'm going to do as I please until we have a talk about that.
Ben, there was an implied "usually" in my 84.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:42 PM
Tia:
I was there for the most of the second half of the go-go 90s. And I might be confused about something. I think lots of people go on a series of initial dates at the same time. If that's the norm Tia was talking about, I'm on her side. I was thinking more of sex, where, in my circle, if you were having sex with someone, you'd expect it to be monogomous unless otherwise indicated.
Again, I'm hidebound. But the hidebound are legion, even in NYC.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:46 PM
LB, the paying thing is often much more fluid too, unless you're a grad student dating an i-banker or something extreme like that.
also i find on occasion that it can be incredibly sexy for me to pay for a man. (oo, flex). as well as the reverse.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:46 PM
121: We've discussed that before, and I think someone defended "man-pays, man-pursues". Or not quite. I don't the remember what the thread was about.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:47 PM
Ben, there was an implied "usually" in my 84.
No less alien, but then, I've led an extraordinarily uneventful life.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:50 PM
It might be generational; I'm about LB's age. I think the rest of you lot are early to mid 20s. That's close to a decade, and y'all grew up in the shadow of the mighty Clenis.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:50 PM
126: Ah, here we go. It was more like everyone took it as a given. My rather cryptic comment here maybe from the same sentiment as LB´s 121.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 3:55 PM
late 20s, SCMT. will be pushing thirty soon. agéd!
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 4:12 PM
re: parallel dating. I'd certainly not want to come across as trying to enforce some kind of moralistic code here, and I don't see the problem if everyone understands the rules and if the 'commodification' element is dealt with through strict parity between the sexes in terms of who holds the decision-making power and who pays.
However, it's certainly the case that that practice would not be seen as acceptable in my social circle and I'm fairly confident, although I can't speak with total certainty, among British people in general. It's just not how things work.
My problem with US dating practice is much more that it seems too much like 'shopping' for potential partners and, on a metaphorical level, an incredibly restrictive and 'capitalistic' process in a way that seems alien to the much more random and less rigid way that things generally seem to work here.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 4:27 PM
I know New Yorkers who date a lot, I know New Yorkers who don't. I'd say the difference is that people who rate themselves as relatively attractive, and are, in some self-conscious way "on the market," date a lot, and have overlapping partners; people who think of themselves as odd or geeky or shy or particularly hopeless romantics, do not. Does that resolve the problem of norms?
It's not a question of one's objective attractiveness, either, but of some internal designation, or notion of self.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 5:54 PM
That's weird, ac, and maybe true. The friends I have who date many people at a time are the kind who define their self-worth through other people's responses to their looks. Those that don't overlap dates tend to be the kind who don't list "attractive" as their most important quality.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 5:59 PM
It just gets stranger and stranger.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 6:09 PM
Yeah, I wonder about that--if there's some inverse relationship between consciously thinking about your attractiveness all the time and being dependent on the judgment of others. I had a friend who was approached in the supermarket by a well-known director who wanted to put her in a film, just based on her looks. To me it sounded as though he had no intention of actually casting her, and simply wanted to spend some time on the casting couch. Her head was completely turned by the gesture, however, and it took her forever to come around to my point of view, which turned out to be the correct one. I was surprised that she was so gullible. She is very pretty, but I had assumed she had some knowledge of this separate from horny directors telling her so in supermarkets.
She's a friend who has dated lots.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 6:14 PM
Sorry, I don't mean "inverse" there (started a different sentence); "counterintuitive" perhaps.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 6:16 PM
It makes a certain amount of sense. If you particularly value your attractiveness, you want some reward for it, if only to confirm the consistently high value of that attractiveness. Similarly, if you particularly value your intelligence, you probably want approbation, either in school, at work, or on strange philosophy-tinged cock joke blogs, for your smart comments.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 6:23 PM
Have you heard the one about Heidegger and the strumpet?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 6:28 PM
134 -- is that in response to 133? Cause nothing said in 133 seemed very weird to me. Doesn't it make sense to you?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 6:41 PM
I just mean the whole discussion (about serial vs. parallel dating), and then the suggestion that this has to do with how important being attractive is to people. It's all pretty foreign to my experience and I'm learning a lot. That's all.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 6:45 PM
Ah ok. Makes sense. I was just surprised to see it where it was I guess because 133 was one of the first comments in a while on this thread that I feel like I can connect with emotionally -- the whole dating thing is really pretty far outside my experience (enough so to seem otherworldly) but that thing about the daters doing it for validation of their prettiness put it in a context I could begin to grok.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 8:07 PM
Yeah, it was actually a comment I had been thinking about making for a while, but by the time I got around to it it wasn't quite apropos of where the thread was.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 8:12 PM
the whole dating thing is really pretty far outside my experience
Yeah, I think I've been single a grand total of about a year (in small, two- or three-month chunks) since 1986.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 8:13 PM
Slut.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 8:15 PM
It's unfamiliar to me for what is I guess the opposite reason: I've been single for a long time, and I'm never really sure how to do the dating thing or even if it's the right way to approach things in my circumstances (probably not). So I don't really have any insight into issues like this, but I do appreciate all the discussion and have learned a lot.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 6-06 8:20 PM
I'm with SCMT in 124. I think it's perfectly appropriate to date in parallel initially, i.e. go out on dates with more than one person. In fact, I think it's healthy, because otherwise I'm likely to obsess about the other person. But, personally, I'm not interested in having sex outside of a monogomous relationship.
And I guess that I'm atotal prude, because unless I already knew the guy through friends, I probably wouldn't invite him in or go up to his apartment to make out on the first date. And I don't think that I'd be ready to sleep with someone on the third date. Maybe by the 5th. I guess that I'm stereotypically girly about this in the saving your fruit sort of way, but actually I don't think it's that. I think that intimacy makes me feel really vulnerable, and I want the degree of physical intimacy to be in sync with the emotional intimacy.
Even in Britain, I don't think that McGrattan's system is universally applicable. I went out on a few dates with an English guy. I wasn't terribly interested in him, but spliiting the dinner check seemed to make him uncmfortable. He also took me to see a play, and he bought the tickets. Of course, I had to take a bus to get into London so that may have been why he felt that it was appropriate for him to shoulder more of the costs.
Where is text when I need him to back me up on this? I believe that ogged takes sex seriously too.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 04- 7-06 1:14 AM
131-
there is a gendering filter going on here too, I think. As a guy, Matt, you probably do the initiating of things much more often, so you can choose when something begins, and you wouldn't initiate things with more than one person at a time.
As a woman, people sometimes initiate things with me -- and that can overlap. How would these hapless men know if anyone else had asked me out to dinner the day before? and why shouldn't i go out with both, if i don't know them as well as i'd like yet? hence parallel dating.
people chose between romantic partners before the dread days of capitalism too.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 04- 7-06 3:27 AM
re: 147
Perhaps, although actually I've generally not been in the habit of initiating things. In the past I'd struggle to think, apart form a couple of occasions, _who_ initiated things, they just happened.
Of course people chose partners in the past, people still choose partners now. My point is just that things do seem different here (the UK) from there (the US) and what's different is the manner of the choosing, iyswim. Of course these are crude generalisations, and I'm sure they're nothing more than that, <platitude> every individual is different< /platitude >, etc.
And seriously, if I asked someone out -- for anything more than just a cup of coffee or a beer -- and they agreed and they also agreed to go out with someone else then I'd be offended. It's rude. As I said above, it's like talking to someone at a party whose constantly looking over your shoulder in case someone more glamourous or interesting turns up. It also implies that your time -- I don't mean you personally, obviously, it's the impersonal 'you' -- is so valuable to you that you'd rather not wait a few days before accepting the other date invitation.
Now if, as lots of commentators have said above, the norm is different in the US then that's maybe something that I'd just have to get used to and perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd been brought up in that dating culture but from my socio-cultural perspective it's rude.
That rudeness has nothing to do with any gender-based possessiveness -- as I think I've indicated there's a fair bit of casual beer-mediated physical intimacy here and I don't see that remotely as a problem -- but rather it's a matter of really not rating other people that highly and rating yourself (impersonal 'you' again) and your time rather more highly.
[I'm a bit uncomfortable with coming over as hectoring here... I'm more mystified by US dating culture than I am offended by it]
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04- 7-06 6:31 AM
huh. i guess i find 148 hard to square what you're saying with the beer-mediated casual intimacy with lots of different people that you also describe.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 04- 7-06 5:03 PM
Parallel dating is fine.
Parallel fucking, now that can get intense. Not that there's anything wrong with it.
Posted by Adam Ash | Link to this comment | 04- 7-06 8:29 PM