Interesting Points on Serial Monogamy: "Every new relationship is less passionate than the previous because we develop a strong shield (though most damage seems done after the breakup of the first), until people reach their late twenties and make a rational calculation on who to settle down with."

TangoAlphaBravo · 2014-06-26T02:15:21+00:00

So the ideal thing would be to find a woman before she has any other relationship?

Beardsman2 · 2014-06-26T06:59:10+00:00

Unfortunately I think this works for both men and women. With every new sex partner I care less and less about them. It's something that concerns me. Will I ever love someone like I loved my first 2 girlfriends? I think the answer is yes, but I don't want to tempt fate, I've been thinking about restricting my sex partners and waiting until I've found someone I could marry as its getting out of control.

rztzz · 2014-06-26T14:31:30+00:00

This is an unpopular opinion around here but is partly why I advocate BOTH men and women be selective in hooking up and dating. My number of women is now probably 30, and I fear that it's negatively affecting my ability to connect with women.

A truly attractive man will turn down any girl that he doesn't admire.

[deleted] · 2014-06-26T15:44:44+00:00

http://mpcdot.com/forums/topic/7751-why-one-relationship-is-better-than-many/

... a relationship always captures a part of you more or less permanently, which you can think of as the sum of shared memories, feelings, and changes over its course. Those experiences belong to the relationship, and when you leave the relationship you leave them in a past that continues to recede. One of the things that makes relationship endings so painful is the loss of those experiences from what you might think of as your current existence. Sometimes it feels like a kind of death and takes years of grieving to get over. It's the pain of losing a part of yourself that was fused with that relationship.

The most vivid experiences you have are often firsts, as in your first trip abroad or your first apartment or your first job or your first home or your first move away from where you grew up. Much like a lot of physical experiences, the first captures the greatest degree of intensity and subsequent iterations lose emotional resonance. These are important experiences in isolation, but when shared with someone they involve an extra quality of experience--well, we're social creatures. If you go to a comedy club alone, no matter how funny the comedian is, it's not the same as being there with someone who is sharing your enjoyment.

All of these first experiences change you, but when you end a relationship and start a new one you are essentially rebooting to a new, smaller set of shared experiences that can never include already experienced changes. Not only have you lost some part of the experiences you shared with someone else (in my experience they don't retain the same vitality they had after a breakup), but as changing experiences they are excluded from all subsequent relationships.

This is true even with bad experiences, which oddly enough can also be important in binding people together. Surviving a tough financial stretch, or getting burglarized, or losing your job, or becoming hospitalized--these also provide an important social glue, and when the relationship in which they took place expires you lose out on the binding effect they gave.

If you keep ending and starting relationships often enough, you will eventually reach the point where all your new relationships are relatively shallow partnerships, where the best of both of you--at any rate the changes that made you who you are--lies in the past.

exit_sandman · 2014-06-26T08:08:38+00:00

He tends to forget that marriages weren't necessarily passionate either before and a lot of settling down took place as well, though in that case it was forced by society ("you have to marry young and not fool around!") and not by the biological clock.

The difference was that being "husband material" was a lot more attractive back then because it didn't mean that you have to spent your 20s out in the cold, but had an equally young partner at your side.

kingofpoplives · 2014-06-26T18:59:18+00:00

It's pretty obvious that our culture is moving away from static monogamy and towards more dynamic, fluid sexual relationships with a greater number of partners. It is also clear that this change is undermining the stability of marriage and the family unit, as well as reducing birth rates.

Is this a bad thing? For Western civilization as a whole it almost certainly is, but there may also be certain benefits that result from the creation of more independent, individualized people. Still, it's hard not to look at diving birth rates and not extrapolate that towards our nation going extinct. We've been in a strong dysgenic trend for multiple generations that continues to accelerate.

It doesn't seem like any amount of hand wringing or logical argumentation is going to motivate people take up socially conservative values again and reverse this movement away from marriage and family.

[deleted] · 2014-06-26T03:07:44+00:00

A good read, food for thought.

[deleted] · 2014-06-26T21:56:31+00:00

i think we need to understand that the love of a men is different from the love of a women.

i think men put everything in his love and will do anything for it.

for women is strategic they are the ones who have to survive for the race to continue, their nature is more like they are the quarterbacks and they have the ball (baby), and we men are the blockers.

i think a men (and a women) when in a monogamy deep down know that the man is putting more in it that the woman, but rationalize it away.

for that reason now Charlie Sheen with the 3 girls living with him does not seem crazy to me anymore

everyone_wins · 2014-06-26T04:56:38+00:00

What would you say to me if I told you that it's possible to live every moment as if it's the first time you've experienced it? What about if I told you that it's silly to try and protect yourself from emotional trauma because that "self" you value so highly doesn't even exist?

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